Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Second Workshop on Systems and Storage Technology November 24, 2003 Organized by the IBM Research Lab in Haifa

You are cordially invited to participate in a one-day workshop on Systems and Storage Technology, to be held on Monday, November 24, 2003 at the IBM Research Lab in Haifa, located on the Haifa University campus, Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel.

This full-day workshop will provide a forum for the research and development communities from both academia and industry to share their work, exchange ideas, and discuss issues, problems, and work-in-progress, as well as future research directions and trends.

The workshop will focus on the following major challenges in the field of systems and storage technologies:

Business Continuity: As organizations become increasingly dependent on a continuous flow of information across distributed, heterogeneous environments, disruptions to that flow become more and more intolerable. Minimizing data loss, rapid recovery to a consistent state, and reduction in security risks are essential for preserving business continuity.

Grid Computing: Grid computing enables the virtualization of distributed computing and data resources, such as processing, network bandwidth, and storage capacity to create a single system image, granting users and applications seamless access to vast IT capabilities. Grid computing keeps complexity hidden, brings computing resources together, and enables virtualization of computing resources.

Autonomic Computing and Advanced Systems Management: In an increasingly complex and heterogeneous IT environment, management of computing systems becomes more complex, more expensive, and requires increasingly specialized personnel. The autonomic computing model introduces computing systems that are self-managing, self-healing, self-organized, resilient, responsive, efficient, and secure.

The workshop will cover new storage systems as well as advanced systems technologies.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Business Continuity * High availability and scalability * End-to-end availability and quality of service * Data replication and copy services * Disaster recovery * Data security and integrity

Grid Computing * Grid services, standards and frameworks (OGSA, grid as on-demand platform, programming models) * Grid infrastructure (e.g., storage, security, policy, scheduling) * Grid business (economic models, grid vs. .net/WS/CORBA) * Data and storage grids

Autonomic Computing and Advanced Systems Management * Integrated server, network and storage management * Problem determination and resolution * Resource and operation modeling * Self-management * Self-healing

New Storage Systems Technologies * Object storage * Novel data access models * Reference data and persistence archive * iSCSI technologies

The workshop will take place in the auditorium (room L100) of the IBM Research Lab in Haifa. A detailed agenda and participation information will be distributed at a later date.

Please feel free to further distribute this invitation to students and fellow researchers/developers.

Important dates: October 25, 2003: Abstracts due November 10, 2003: Notification of paper acceptance November 24, 2003: Workshop gathering and presentations (Monday)

What to submit Please send an abstract describing your work, up to one page in 11pt font, in either DOC or PDF format.

Where to submit Send your submission to moatti (at) il.ibm.com or naamah (at) il.ibm.com

When to submit Please send your submission before October 25, 2003.

Workshop Organizers: Naama Kraus Yosef Moatti

Lots of stuff happened last week, but I wasn’t in a journaling kind of mood. This is quick summary before it all goes away to old memories graveyard.

So what did I do? I played a little with assembly, writing toy programs that did silly things like executing read and write system calls. Mostly I did it to get a feel for the assemblers available on Linux. I tried nasm, and then gas, and I think I’ll use gas from now on. Being standard is a big incentive for me to use it. Now I’m looking for something fun to write that makes sense to be written in assembly. Suggestions?

To counter the evil asm mojo, I also played a lot with emacs lisp, including the emacs battery mode mentioned here earlier. I amused myself with implementing the basic lisp constructs, such as ‘if’, using lisp. All hail “eval”!

Last weekend, I started studying for the classes I’m taking next semester, at least partly because it’s relatively guilt-free structured procrastination from studying for the Algorithmics test I have next week. I’m taking Infi 1, Mathematical Logic (yay!), Compilation and Algorithms, and I read the first chapter in all of them.

Also last weekend, I was sick as a dog with some virus (no, not SoBig.F). Usually when I’m sick, I just grunt and suffer, refusing to take medication unless I’m about to croak. This time I listened to ladypine‘s sage advice and took something to calm my flaming sinuses that made being sick relatively painless. On Sunday morning I went to the doctor’s office, where the nice doctor told me that I have a virus and I’ll get over it, and returned home to find most of the apartment completely flooded with water. After swimming in, I quickly located the source of the incredible amounts of water sloshing past me: a short tube connecting the toilet’s water tank to the wall burst open and happily sprayed half of the country’s water supply into the apartment. It flooded the rest room, the work room and my room, apparently the lowest points in the apartment. How did it happen, and whether or not this is related to the work the landlord’s handyman did in close proximity to said tube a couple of days earlier remains a mystery. I would’ve been a lot more pissed off than I was, except that save for the two or so hours I slaved to drain the water and a couple of wet books, there was no harm done. The computers are all fine. I Can’t wait until next Tuesday when we move to the new apartment!

On Monday, we had a Haifux meeting. Oleg spoke about “Pseudo, Quasi and Real Random Numbers” and gave a great talk. Unfortunately for me, I was still sick and having a hard time concentrating, especially when he started talking about Chi Square tests and Kolmogorov-Smirnov Tests. I need to take an advanced probability class, me’thinks. I don’t feel I know nearly enough probability. Then again, I can say the same thing about nearly anything at all. Oleg’s slides are available on goldshmidt.org and will show up on haifux soonish.

That’s it for now. Plans for this weekend include studying Algorithmics and packing house. What I’ll end up doing is open for guessing, but “procrastinating” seems to be a safe bet…

RAID: High-Performance, Reliable Secondary Storage , by Peter M. Chen, Edward K. Lee, et al. ACM Computing Surveys.

Efficient Coroutine Generation of Constrained Gray Sequences, by Donald E. Knuth and Frank Ruskey (dedicated to the memory of Ole-Johan Dahl)

PowerPC / OS X (Darwin) Shellcode Assembly, “Smashing The Mac For Fun & Profit” By B-r00t.

Linux for S/390 Redbook, by E. Amrehn, et al.