[9fans] SYSTOR 2009---The Israeli Experimental Systems Conference

[Aharon Robbins]

For the systems builders on the list. FYI.

Arnold


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


IBM Haifa Research Lab and IBM Systems and Technology Group Lab, in
collaboration with Israeli academia, are organizing SYSTOR 2009, a
successor to the highly successful workshops on systems and storage
held at the IBM Haifa Research Lab.  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.

SYSTOR 2009 will be a three-day conference combining academic and
industrial sessions. Each day will include a keynote by a well-known
international researcher on one of the conference topics. In addition,
we are planning special activities for graduate students.

Submissions of a practical and experimental nature are solicited for
the academic and industrial sessions. The conference is open to all
systems research topics, including (but not limited to):

* General computer systems issues in operating systems, architecture,
 memory hierarchy, compilation, and embedded systems
* Distributed systems such as peer-to-peer systems, sensor networks,
 and overlays, fault tolerance, and resource allocation
* Storage systems issues related to long term preservation, archival
 storage, internet-scale storage, and replication and consistency
* Cross-cutting issues such as workload modeling, performance metrics,
 power consumption, security, usability, and experience with real
 systems and failures

In particular, we would like to emphasize the following themes:

* Virtualization infrastructure and virtualization-aware system design
* Multi-core architectures and the operating system facilities and
 programming environments that use them
* Power consumption and management
* Managing the explosive growth in storage and the increasing need to
 store, find and manage data for long periods

For the academic track:

Papers should report original research; if part of the material
submitted was published previously, the paper should so indicate and
should provide substantial additional results and material.

For the industrial track:

We are looking for technical presentations that describe the
technology behind real products and the considerations that shaped the
product's design and functionality.

Submissions

Paper submissions should be up to 14 pages in 11 pt font, in pdf
format. To submit, please use the conference submission website:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=3Dsystor2009. Submitted papers
will be reviewed by the program committee. Proceedings including all
accepted papers will be published by ACM in the ACM Digital
Library.

For the industrial track, it is acceptable to submit a short proposal
for a presentation in lieu of a full paper as described above. Please
include sufficient detail to exhibit the technical merit of the
proposed presentation. We encourage accepted industrial presentations
to also write a paper for the proceedings, but this is not
compulsory.

Important Dates:

Submission: January 26, 2009
Notification: March 20, 2009
Final Version: April 10, 2009

Student Activities

As part of the conference, students will have the opportunity to
interact with senior researchers and obtain feedback regarding their
research. To promote such interactions, we will have a poster session
where students present their work. We will also have a lunch where
members of the program committee and IBM researchers will be matched
with students for more intensive interaction.

Venue and Social Event

The conference will be held in the lovely city of Haifa, which
overlooks the Mediterranean Sea, and is home to Jews, Muslims, and
Christians. Haifa is also the world center of the Baha'i faith. A trip
will be organized to the wondrous Baha'i gardens and to areas in the
city of Jerusalem.

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 [miriama AT il.ibm.com]

Publicity Chair:
Muli Ben-Yehuda, IBM [muli AT il.ibm.com]

Publication Chair:
Gregory Chockler, IBM

Website Chair:
Avital Tuviana, IBM

Industrial Publicity Chair:
Gilad Sharaby, IBM

Program Committee:
Miriam Allalouf, IBM
Roberto Baldoni, Univ. of Rome
Muli Ben-Yehuda, IBM
Tsahi Birk, Technion
Gregory Chockler, IBM
Dilma Da Silva, IBM
Shlomi Dolev, Ben-Gurion Univ.
David Du, NSF
Greg Ganger, CMU
Sami Iren, Seagate
Nikolai Jukov, IBM
Idit Keidar, Technion
Israel Koren, UMASS
Jeanna Matthews, Clarkson Univ./VMware
Avi Mendelson, Intel
Ethan Miller, UCSC
David Nagle, Google
Erich Nahum, IBM
Danny Raz, Technion
Scott Rixner, Rice University
Larry Rudolph, VMware
Liuba Shrira, Brandeis
Neeraj 

Re: [9fans] Changelogs & Patches?

[erik quanstrom]

> Fossil has always been a weak link, and probably will always be until
> somebody replaces it. There was some idea of replacing it with a
> version of ken's fs that uses a venti backend...

i looked into how that would go enough to see
that venti would work at cross purposes to the
fs.  having a w address doesn't make much sense
when you can address by content.

in hindsight, that was likely obvious to everyone
but me.

i think ken's fs makes perfect sense without venti.
it has reasonable device support these days
(aoe, ata, ahci, marvell 88sx).

- erik

Re: [9fans] Changelogs & Patches?

[Steve Simon]

> Fossil has always been a weak link, and probably will always be until
> somebody replaces it. There was some idea of replacing it with a
> version of ken's fs that uses a venti backend...
>
> Venti's rock solid design is the only thing that makes fossil
> minimally tolerable despite its usual tendency of stepping on its hair
> and falling on his face.

Interesting, you have first hand experience of this?

I have found fossil and venti to be a completely reliable combination,
running 24x7 on two machines for four years now.

I have had three failures of fossil, all due to disks dying, and two
of those where my own fault (over cooling).

-Steve

Re: [9fans] Changelogs & Patches?

[Uriel]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 2:43 AM, Roman V. Shaposhnik  wrote:
> I was specifically referring to a "normal operations"
> to conjure an image of a typical setup of fossil+venti.
>
> In such a setup a corrupted block from a fossil
> partition will go undetected and could end up
> being stored in venti. At that point it will become
> venti "problem".
>
>> i should have been more clear that venti does the
>> checking.  there are many things that fossil doesn't
>> do that it should.
>
> Sure, but I can't really use venti  without using
> fossil (again: we are talking about a typical setup
> here not something like vac/vacfs), can I?
>
> If I can NOT than fossil becomes a weak link that
> can let corrupted data go undetected all the way
> to a venti store.

Fossil has always been a weak link, and probably will always be until
somebody replaces it. There was some idea of replacing it with a
version of ken's fs that uses a venti backend...

Venti's rock solid design is the only thing that makes fossil
minimally tolerable despite its usual tendency of stepping on its hair
and falling on his face.

uriel

> This is quite worrisome for me. At least compared to
> ZFS it is.
>
> Thanks,
> Roman.

Re: [9fans] Changelogs & Patches?

[erik quanstrom]

On Wed Jan 21 01:40:13 EST 2009, st...@quintile.net wrote:
> > ... fossil does have the functionality to serve two
> > different file systems from two different disks, but i don't  think
> > anyone has used that ...
> 
> I do this, 'main' backed up by venti and 'other' which holds useful stuff
> that needn't be backed up, e.g. RFCs, cdrom images, datasheets etc. This is
> accessed via 9fs juke as an homage to the CDROM jukebox that once provided
> a similar filesystem at the labs.

actually, it was a hp jukebox that had mo disks.
alliance (neé plasmon) makes 60gb udo2 drives
  http://www.plasmon.com/archive_solutions/udodrives.html
and these libraries
  http://www.plasmon.com/archive_solutions/glibrary.html
the media are supposedly good for 50 years.

www.quanstro.net/plan9/disklessfs.pdf describes coraid's
worm-replacement strategy.  it is both better (offsite,
very fast access) and not better (the media are less reliable
and not write-once).

it would be neat to have a filesystem built as
filsys main cpe2.0"kcache"{e2.1jw0w1}
all the speed of disks and a perminant record,
but clearly not very cost effective.  and direct-
attach storage doesn't like the right place for
the worm.  it should be offsite.

- erik