Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

I walked 18 kms yesterday, down and back up Mt. Carmel, and loved ever minute of it. Even the hard parts. Especially the hard parts.

Am I growing masochistic in my old age?

The submission deadline for the SYSTOR ’07 Virtualization Workshop is in 5 days (August 16 – get those papers in!) and the submissions have already started trickling in. This is going to be fun.

Lior Kaplan says he missed me, Orna and others at August Penguin 2007. There were two reasons why I did not bother to come this year, despite having been involved with August Penguin since its inception: first, I am no longer interested in the community events of this particular “community”. Second, there were no technical talks (a complaint I see shared by many). It would’ve been nice to meet old friends, but not worth the effort, aggravation and bad memories.

Paper progress: ASPLOS ’08: submitted. EuroSys ’08: just getting started.

I hate breaking other people’s laptops.

I hate working under pressure.

I hate bugs I can’t reproduce.

But I like fixing them.

Interesting reading on the dangers of corporate research labs.

I’ve been writing LaTeX lately as god^Wknuth intended it, choke full of mathematical goodness. The output is beautiful.

openMosix Project End of Life Announcement.

Its been awhile since I’ve been nervous before giving a talk, but I was pretty nervous before the OLS talk this morning. Nonetheless, the talk went pretty well, if I may say so myself. I made sure to mention all sorts of interesting avenues for continuing exploration—if you were there and you’re interested in pursuing some of them together, feel free to drop me an email!

For those who couldn’t make it, here’s a copy of the slides and the paper. Comments are always appreciated, especially since this is a work in progress.

I wonder what is it about the TLV lounge that compels me to update this blog… once again I head off to lands un-known (my first time in California). First to Santa Clara, CA, for FAST-OS and USENIX, then to Ottawa, the other CA, for the Linux virtualization mini-summit (more on this later) and then the venerable OLS. Say hi if you’re in the area!

I happen to have an extra copy of The Idea Factory – Learning to Think at MIT, by Pepper White, and The Bloody Crown of Conan, by Robert E. Howard, both in pristine condition. If you’d like to trade one or both of them for another book, ping me here or at mulix (at) mulix.org.

The Storage and Systems Department at IBM’s Haifa Research Lab (HRL),
in collaboration with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology,
cordially invite you to a full-day workshop on the subject of
virtualization within the SYSTOR 2007 conference. SYSTOR 2007 is the
first high-quality refereed systems and storage conference organized
by HRL, drawing upon the successful foundation of previous systems and
storage seminars. The purpose of this conference is to forge and
nourish research and working relations within the academic and
industrial community in Israel and in the world, targeting researchers
and practitioners alike.

The virtualization workshop in SYSTOR 2007 will present contemporary
advancements in the field of systems virtualization and will feature
two renowned keynote speakers: Danny Dolev from the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem, Israel, and Willy Zwaenepoel from Lausanne Federal
Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland.

SYSTOR 2007 will be held on Monday and Tuesday, October 29-30, 2007,
at the HRL site at the Haifa University campus from 09:15 to
17:15. The virtualization workshop will take place on the first day
followed by the Storage: Market Trends and Future R&D seminar for
practitioners on the second day.

Lunch and refreshments will be served on both days. Participation is
free.

Topics

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

* Virtualization techniques: native, emulation, paravirtualization, OS-level and application-level
* Programming language support for virtualization
* Hardware virtualization support: machine, IO, networking, storage
* Virtual machine support for parallel and distributed computing models
* Applications of virtualization: deployment, security, correctness, and reliability
* Virtual-machine scheduling and resource allocation
* Image management: storage, semantics, cloning and configuration
* Processor and architecture simulators
* Experiences with implementing virtualization

Submission

SYSTOR’s virtualization workshop accepts only original work by the
respective authors. Authors may submit their work either as an
extended abstract (up to 2 pages) or as a full paper (up to 14
pages). Submissions should be in 11 pt font, in .pdf
format. Submissions will be evaluated, after which notifications will
be sent to the authors. All accepted works will be presented in a
single track. No workshop proceedings will be published, but selected
full papers will be published in a special issue of ACM Operating
Systems Review. Extended abstracts will not be published. Work
presented at SYSTOR may have been published elsewhere; in case of such
an overlap, authors should add a reference to the additional
publication to their submission.

To submit, use the web submission system at
http://papers.haifa.il.ibm.com/systor2007/

Important dates

Submission August 16, 2007
Acceptance Notiocation September 13, 2007
Camera-ready (full papers) October 11, 2007
SYSTOR 2007 Virtualization Workshop October 29, 2007

Organizing committee

* Erez Hadad, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Muli Ben-Yehuda, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Eliezer Dekel, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Miriam Allalouf, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Ben-Ami Yassour, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Yaron Wolfsthal, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Dalit Naor, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Assaf Schuster, Technion
* Yitzhak (Tsahi) Birk, Technion

Program committee

* Assaf Schuster, Technion
* Yitzhak (Tsahi) Birk, Technion
* Roy Friedman, Technion
* Sivan Toledo, Tel-Aviv University
* Shlomi Dolev, Ben-Gurion
* Leendert Van Doorn, AMD
* Marc E. Fiuczynski, Princeton
* Dilma Da Silva, IBM T.J. Watson
* Bob Wisniewski,IBM T.J. Watson
* Michael Factor, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Julian Satran, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Muli Ben-Yehuda, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Ilan Shimony, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Leah Shalev, IBM Haifa Research Lab
* Avi Mendelson, Intel Center Israel
* Shimon Shoken, Interdisciplinary Center

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