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More information about the USENIX Windows NT Workshop

Preliminary Technical Program for USENIX Windows NT Workshop

Monday, August 11

9:00-9:10

Opening Remarks

Mike Jones, Microsoft
Ed Lazowska, University of Washington

9:10-10:10

Keynote Address

NT to the Max -- Just How Far Can It Scale Up
Jim Gray, Microsoft Bay Area Research Center

NT is a great file and print server. It also makes a good web, mail, and SQL server. But how does it behave when you attach several hundred disks to a single NT node and run a database application against it? What happens when you spread an application across thirty NTservers and a thousand disks? This talk describes some high-end applications built with NT, and describes some of the unsolved problems these applications present.

Jim Gray is a specialist in database and transaction processing computer systems. At Microsoft his research focuses on scaleable computing: building super-servers and workgroup systems from commodity software and hardware. He is editor of the Performance Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems, and coauthor of Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the ACM, editor-in-chief of the VLDB Journal, and editor of the Morgan Kaufmann series on Data Management.

10:10 am - 10:30 am
Break


10:30 am - Noon

Referred Paper Session: Mangling Executables

Instrumentation and Optimization of Win32/Intel Executables
Ted Romer, Geoff Voelker, Dennis Lee, Alec Wolman, Wayne Wong, Hank Levy, Brian N. Bershad, University of Washington, J. Bradley Chen, Harvard University

DIGITAL FX!32 - Running 32-Bit x86 Applications on Alpha NT
Anton Chernoff, Ray Hookway, Digital Equipment Corporation

Spike: An Optimizer for Alpha/NT Executables
Robert Cohn, David Goodwin, P. Geoffrey Lowney, Norman Rubin, Digital Equipment Corporation

Improving Instruction Locality with Just-In-Time Code Layout
J. Bradley Chen and Bradley D. D. Leupen, Harvard University

Noon - 1:30 pm
Lunch (on your own)


1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Tutorial Session: Available Tools--

A Guided tour of Win32 SDK, NT Resource Kit, VTune, etc.
Speakers TBA

3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Break

3:30 pm - 5:30 pm

Refereed Paper Session: Driver Tricks

The RTX Real-Time Subsystem for Windows NT
Bill Carpenter, Mark Roman, Nick Vasilatos, Myron Zimmerman, VenturCom, Inc.

A Scheduling Scheme for Network Saturated NT Multiprocessors
Joergen Svaerke Hansen and Eric Jul, DIKU

Coordinated Thread Scheduling for Workstation Clusters Under Windows NT
Matt Buchanan and Andrew A. Chien, UIUC

Creating User-Mode Device Drivers with a Proxy
Galen C. Hunt, University of Rochester

5:30 pm - 6:00 pm Break

6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Panel Session: Do You Need Source?

This session will examine what you do and don't need NT source code for as a researcher. Speakers TBA.

7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Dinner on your onw.


8:30 pm - 11:00 pm
Dessert Reception, Seattle Aquarium

Tuesday, August 12

9:00 am - 10:00 am

Invited Talk

What A Tangled Mess! Untangling User-Visible Complexity in Windows Systems
Rob Short, Microsoft Corporation

Today you can buy a Windows PC system from hundreds of manufacturers and choose from thousands options and separate programs. However, the interactions between these components often results in havoc, with programs wiping out each other's files and hardware devices configured with the same addresses or interrupt levels. End users are faced with an encyclopedia of acronyms that are totally meaningless to many engineers, let alone the average homeowner trying to do their taxes. I will describe work in the Windows NT operating system to bring order to this chaos, from the technical challenges of discovering and identifying hardware, to creating a simple user interface for installing hardware and software, to managing thousands of systems with absolutely no end user involvement at all.

10:00 am - 10:30 am
Break


10:30 am - Noon

Refereed Paper Session: Performance

Measuring Windows NT - Possibilities and Limitations
Yasuhiro Endo and Margo Seltzer, Harvard University

Delivery of High Quality Uncompressed Video over ATM to Windows NT Desktop
Sherali Zeadally, University of Southern California

Dreams in a Nutshell
Steven Sommer, Microsoft Research Institute, Macquarie University

Adding Response Time Measurement of CIFS File Server Performance to NetBench
Karl L. Swartz, Network Appliance

Noon - 1:30 pm
Workshop Luncheon


1:30 pm -3:00 pm

Invited Talks and Panel: Building Distributed Applications: CORBA and DCOM

This session will highlight the strengths and weakness of CORBA and DCOM for building real distributed applications. May also include Distributed Java-related issues. Speakers TBA.

3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Break


3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Referred Paper Session: Distributed Systems

Brazos: A Third Generation DSM System
Evan Speight and John K. Bennett, Rice University

Moving The Ensemble Groupware System To NT and Wolfpack
K. Birman, W. Vogels, K. Guo, M. Hayden, T. Hickey, R. Friedman, S. Maffeis, R. van Renesse, A. Vaysburd, Cornell University

4:30 pm - 5:30 pm

Paper session: We're Not in Kansas Anymore

Parallel Processing with Windows NT Networks
Partha Dasgupta, Arizona State University

OPENNT: UNIX Application Portability to Windows NT via an Alternative Environment Subsystem
Stephen Walli, Softway Systems Inc.

Porting UNIX to Windows NT
David Korn, AT&T Labs

5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
Dinner (on your own)


Wednesday, August 13

9:00 am - 10:00 am

Invited Talk

Security Issues
Butler Lampson, Microsoft

10:00 am - 10:30 am
Break


10:30 am - Noon

Case Studies: Deep Ports

This session will describe the tradeoffs of porting substantial UNIX programs to NT shallowly (keeping them as UNIX-like as possible) vs. deeply (taking as much advantage of NT functionality as possible). Presentation will focus around case studies of real ported applications. Speakers TBA.

Noon - 1:30 pm
Workshop Luncheon

1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Invited Talk

NT Futures Felipe Cabrera, Windows NT Architect and Frank Artale, Director, Windows NT Program Management: Microsoft

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