Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

                   CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

    SYSTOR 2009---The Israeli Experimental Systems Conference
       http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/conferences/systor2009/
                        4-6 May 2009
                        Haifa, Israel

Registration deadline: May 2nd

SYSTOR 2009, the Israeli Experimental Systems Conference, will be held
at IBM Haifa Labs, in Haifa, Israel. The conference program will run
over three days, combining the forefront of academic systems research
with real-world systems developed in industry. The goal of the
conference is to promote systems research and to foster stronger ties
between the Israeli and worldwide systems research communities and
industry. Conference proceedings will be published by ACM in the ACM
Digital Library.

There is a limited number of seats available on a
first-come-first-served basis upon registration at
http://www.haifa.ibm.com/conferences/systor2009/registration.shtml
(registration is free of charge). Lunch and refreshments will be
served on all three days courtesy of IBM Haifa Labs.

The first day of the conference will feature sessions on distributed
systems, concurrency, and power management. Marc Snir, University of
Illinois at Urbana Champaign, will give a keynote talk, and in the
afternoon a student poster session with sweet refreshments will be
held.

The second day will begin with the keynote "Towards Invisible Storage"
by Alain Azagury, Director, XIV Business Executive, IBM, and an
invited talk on "The Next Generation Data Center" by Michael Kagan,
Mellanox CTO. After the morning talks, there will be paper sessions
focusing on data de-duplication and storage issues. The day will end
with an optional social event in Caesarea.

The third day will conclude the conference with paper sessions on
virtualization and system optimizations, and a panel of well-known
systems researchers who will debate "What is Systems Research about
and is it Relevant?" The full program for all three days is available
on the conference website.

We look forward to seeing you at SYSTOR 2009!

SYSTOR Advisory Committee
    * Marc Auslander, IBM
    * Ken Birman, Cornell
    * Danny Dolev, HUJI
    * Julian Satran, IBM
    * Marc Snir, UIUC
    * Willy Zwaenepoel, EPFL

Program Chairs
    * Michael Factor, IBM
    * Dror Feitelson, HUJI

General Chair
    * Miriam Allalouf, IBM

Publicity Chair
    * Muli Ben Yehuda, IBM

Publication Chair
    * Gregory Chockler, IBM

I want to update this thing more often, but there’s so much going on, the days filled with action and counter-action, that before I know it it’s past midnight, and I have to wake up at 5 AM for a workout, and updating the blog is left on the TODO list for yet another day. Like, today.

So, content?

I’ve been a manager for a month and change now, managing the virtualization and systems architecture group at the lab. It’s an interesting challenge (which is why I agreed to do it), often frustrating, occasionally exhilarating. To my surprise, the part I like most is dealing with human beings in their myriad forms. To my non-surprise, the part I like least is the bureaucracy, but I figured I’d wait a couple more months before I start tilting at wind-mills. I still write code (well, debug code, mostly) and conduct research, but it’s no longer the most important part of my day.

On the research front, we had two papers accepted to ICAC 2009 (one full paper and one short paper/poster), both in the general area of treating virtual machines as black boxes and inferring useful things about them—performance bottlenecks and boot-time–via statistical analysis of their inputs and outputs. Another paper, on the DMA mapping problem in direct assignment, was not accepted to USENIX ATC to my disappointment, and we are now revising it while looking for a new home.

I am continuing to work out twice a week with a private trainer who is seriously kicking my butt. It’s rare when I don’t finish a workout on the brink of exhaustion, drenched in sweat. I *love* it. Twice a week is no longer enough—I crave the endorphin rushes and sore muscles—so I’ve also re-started going for long walks, and hitting the punching bag in the back-yard like I really mean it. The kilograms are coming off, too, an added bonus.

Last but not least, SYSTOR 2009 is coming up next month, with a great program combining academic research and real-world systems. See y’all there!