REFEREED PAPERS

Introductory Remarks by Program Co-Chairs and Best Paper Awards

Decoupling Dynamic Program Analysis from Execution in Virtual Environments
Jim Chow, Tal Garfinkel, and Peter M. Chen, VMware

Protection Strategies for Direct Access to Virtualized I/O Devices
Paul Willmann, Alan L. Cox, and Scott Rixner, Rice University

Bridging the Gap Between Software and Hardware Techniques for I/O Virtualization
Jose Renato Santos, Yoshio Turner, and G. (John) Janakiraman, HP Labs; Ian Pratt, Cambridge University

INVITED TALKS

Free and Open Source as Viewed by a Processor Developer
Peter Kronowitt, Intel

Intel designs, builds, and markets microprocessors. We are often viewed as being downstream of the work done by the closed source programming community. In fact, however, long before the term "free and open source" was coined, Intel was working to develop, release, and support software for many of the devices we and other firms design and manufacture. This talk highlights how Intel successfully utilized open source to support industry progress while fulfilling our own strategic corporate objectives.

Our experiences with being "good citizens" were not easy and did not "just happen." We hope that others can learn from both our successes and our failures and take these ideas back to their own firms. I will highlight areas where we at Intel learned from our missteps, ultimately improving our community standing.

The talk does not just look back: some of our open source projects initiated in the past twelve months will be examined, as we believe many in the audience will find them interesting and, we hope, will consider helping improve them.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

REFEREED PAPERS

Idle Read After Write: IRAW
Alma Riska and Erik Riedel, Seagate Research

Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance
Nitin Agrawal, University of Wisconsin; Vijayan Prabhakaran, Ted Wobber, John D. Davis, Mark Manasse, and Rina Panigrahy, Microsoft Research

Context-Aware Mechanisms for Reducing Interactive Delays of Energy Management in Disks
Igor Crk and Chris Gniady, University of Arizona

INVITED TALKS

From Flapping Birds to Space Telescopes: The Modern Science of Origami
Robert J. Lang, Artist and Consultant

The last decade of this past century has been witness to a revolution in the development and application of mathematical techniques to origami, the centuries-old Japanese art of paper-folding. The techniques used in mathematical origami design range from the abstruse to the highly approachable. In this talk I will describe how geometric concepts led to the solution of a broad class of origami folding problems—specifically, the problem of efficiently folding a shape with an arbitrary number and arrangement of flaps—and enabled origami designs of mind-blowing complexity and realism, some of which you'll see, too. As often happens in mathematics, theory developed for its own sake has led to some surprising practical applications. The algorithms and theorems of origami design have shed light on long-standing mathematical questions and have solved practical engineering problems. I will discuss how origami has enabled safer airbags, Brobdingnagian space telescopes, and more.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

REFEREED PAPERS

INVITED TALKS

Millicomputing: The Future in Your Pocket and Your Datacenter
Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix, Inc., and Homebrew Mobile Club

The fastest-moving part of the computer industry is now the compute power and storage capacity of the computers we carry in our pockets. The software we carry in our pockets is also migrating to a full-featured, flexible, and openly programmable operating system. This talk discusses the multicore graphical supercomputer for 2010, which won't burn your leg if you put it in your pocket, and the implications of these changes for both the personal computing space and the enterprise computing/green datacenter space. A millicomputer doesn't need heat-sinks or fans.

The kind of power and storage provided by iPhone-class systems will increase by a factor of four to eight times over the next two years. The component maker roadmaps also show the addition of high-performance 3D graphics, video stream processors, and several GFLOPS of floating-point number crunching within the same 250 milliwatt power budget as today's millicomputer CPUs.

The power envelope of Intel's 64-bit PC-class CPUs is on a collision course with mobile devices over the next few years. Intel is working down into this space to compete with the ARM-based CPUs which currently dominate battery-powered pocket devices.

Each new wave of computing has liberated its users and become more pervasive. In recent history the desktop PC and phone tied to a wired network have been replaced by the wireless laptop and mobile phone. In the next wave, the boundaries between laptop and phone will blur. They will be capable of running the same operating systems and applications and will talk to the same networks. Everyone will be online all the time. How will our lifestyle change? What are the new applications? What is ambient presence?

Datacenter power consumption is a hot topic. By leveraging CPU designs from the world of battery-powered devices and flash-memory-based storage, we can make very cool systems. A single millicomputer draws less than one watt, and enterprise millicomputer arrays provide large numbers of small computing units at a total cost, performance, and power consumption that redefine the limits of what is possible. These systems are being specified as open source hardware by their end users. This talk covers the roadmap of architecture and performance characteristics of millicomputers over the next two years.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

REFEREED PAPERS

FlexVols: Flexible, Efficient File Volume Virtualization in WAFL
John K. Edwards, Daniel Ellard, Craig Everhart, Robert Fair, Eric Hamilton, Andy Kahn, Arkady Kanevsky, James Lentini, Ashish Prakash, Keith A. Smith, and Edward Zayas, Network Appliance Inc.

Fast, Inexpensive Content-Addressed Storage in Foundation
Sean Rhea, Meraki, Inc.; Russ Cox and Alex Pesterev, MIT CSAIL

Adaptive File Transfers for Diverse Environments
Himabindu Pucha, Carnegie Mellon University; Michael Kaminsky, Intel Research; David Andersen, Carnegie Mellon University; Michael Kozuch, Intel Research

INVITED TALKS

Programming DNA: A 2-bit Language for Engineering Biology
Drew Endy, Cabot Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT and a co-founder of the BioBricks Foundation (BBF)

Biological engineering does not have to be confined to high-end industry laboratories. A more open culture of biological technology should be fostered. This talk is an effort in that direction: it aims to equip you with basic practical knowledge of biological engineering.

Genetic engineering is now a thirty-year-old technology. For reference, it was over a similar period of time that modern computing machines went from exclusive objects used to design weapons of mass destruction to the now ubiquitous panoply of personal computing devices that support mass communication and construction. Inspired by this and many other examples of overwhelmingly constructive uses of technology by individuals, we have been working over the past five years to develop new tools that will help to make biology easy to engineer. We have also been working to foster a constructive culture of future biological technologists who can reliably and responsibly conceive, develop, and deliver biological technologies that solve local problems.

This talk will introduce current best practice in biological engineering, including an overview of how to order synthetic DNA and how to use and contribute standard biological parts to an open source collection of genetic functions. The talk will also discuss issues of human practice, including biological safety; biological security; ownership, sharing, and innovation in biotechnology; community organization; and perception across many different publics. My hope is that the conference attendees will help me to understand how best to enable an overwhelmingly constructive hacker culture for programming DNA.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

Poster Session & Happy Hour

Session Chairs: Emre Kıcıman, Microsoft Research; Sam King, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The poster session, held in conjunction with a happy hour, will allow researchers to present recent and ongoing projects. The poster session is an excellent forum to discuss new ideas and get useful feedback from the community. The poster submissions should include a brief description of the research idea(s); the submission must not exceed 2 pages. Accepted posters will be put on the conference Web site; however, they will not be printed in the conference Proceedings. Send poster submissions to session chairs Emre Kıcıman and Sam King at usenix08posters@usenix.org by Tuesday, May 6, 2008.

Awards Presentation: USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award and Software Tools User Group (STUG) Award

Keynote Address

This talk will explain:

• Why the La-Z-Boy era of programming is over
• Why the parallel revolution cannot be halted by a no-confidence vote from the USENIX community
• The implications for the IT industry if the revolution should fail
• The opportunities and pitfalls of this revolution
• What Berkeley is doing to be at the forefront of this revolution

Power to the (manycore) processors!

REFEREED PAPERS

Handling Flash Crowds from Your Garage
Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell, Microsoft Research

Remote Profiling of Resource Constraints of Web Servers Using Mini-Flash Crowds
Pratap Ramamurthy, University of Wisconsin—Madison; Vyas Sekar, Carnegie Mellon University; Aditya Akella, University of Wisconsin—Madison; Balachander Krishnamurthy, AT&T Labs—Research; Anees Shaikh, IBM Research

A Dollar from 15 Cents: Cross-Platform Management for Internet Services
Christopher Stewart, University of Rochester and HP Labs; Terence Kelly and Alex Zhang, HP Labs; Kai Shen, University of Rochester

INVITED TALKS

Xen and the Art of Virtualization Revisited
Ian Pratt, Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and Fellow, King's College Cambridge

This is a talk in three parts. I'll give a summary of the Xen story so far, looking at how Xen made the transition from research project to enterprise software and the many challenges along the way. Next, I'll look at why virtualization is such a hot topic in IT and the failings of common operating systems that have led to this. I'll then look at how Xen has evolved since the 2004 SOSP paper, seeing how paravirtualization and software/hardware co-design have helped reduce the overhead of virtualization.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

REFEREED PAPERS

Measurement and Analysis of Large-Scale Network File System Workloads
Andrew Leung, University of California, Santa Cruz; Shankar Pasupathy and Garth Goodson, NetApp, Inc.; Ethan Miller, University of California, Santa Cruz

Evaluating Distributed Systems: Does Background Traffic Matter?
Kashi Venkatesh Vishwanath and Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego

Cutting Corners: Workbench Automation for Server Benchmarking
Piyush Shivam, Varun Marupadi, Jeff Chase, and Shivnath Babu, Duke University

INVITED TALKS

A Report on the Project Darkstar Anthropological Expedition Into the World of Massively Scaled Online Games
Jim Waldo, Sun Microsystems Labs

While the culture of enterprise computing, transaction processing, and Web services has developed, an entirely different culture centering on computing has been evolving in a different ecosystem. Although those in our culture tend to play with the artifacts produced by their culture and those in their culture tend to use the programming languages produced in our culture, in fact the two groups lost contact somewhere in the Colossal Cave and have had little real interaction since.

These cultures are about to be brought together again. The architectural move to multicore, multithreaded chips will require changes in the way games are programmed, while the requirements of scaling in games such as World of Warcraft require the use of distributed systems. As virtual worlds emerge, the distinction between business or scientific systems and games will start to disappear.

During the past two years, I have led a project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories to build a highly scalable, highly concurrent infrastructure for massive-scale online games and virtual worlds. This work has brought us into contact with the culture of games and the inhabitants of that culture. In this talk I will describe some of the ways in which the game world differs from the computing world most of us are used to, and I'll discuss the challenges facing that world that might profitably be approached in a cross-cultural fashion.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

REFEREED PAPERS

Power-aware Remote Replication for Enterprise-level Disaster Recovery Systems
Kazuo Goda and Masaru Kitsuregawa, The University of Tokyo

A Linux Implementation Validation of Track-Aligned Extents and Track-Aligned RAIDs
Jin Qian, Chris Meyers, and An-I Andy Wang, Florida State University

Automatic Optimization of Parallel Dataflow Programs
Christopher Olston, Benjamin Reed, Adam Silberstein, and Utkarsh Srivastava, Yahoo! Research

A TCP-layer Name Service for TCP Ports
Sérgio Freire and André Zúquete, IEETA/University of Aveiro

Using Causality to Diagnose Configuration Bugs
Mona Attariyan and Jason Flinn, University of Michigan

Diverse Replication for Single-Machine Byzantine-Fault Tolerance
Byung-Gon Chun, ICSI; Petros Maniatis, Intel Research Berkeley; Scott Shenker, University of California, Berkeley

INVITED TALKS

Internet Surveillance: Building Our Own Trojan Horse
Susan Landau, Sun Microsystems

From its requirement that surveillance capabilities be built into VoIP communications systems to its expansion of warrantless wiretapping into any communications of which one end is "reasonably believed" to be located outside the United States, the U.S. federal government is slowly but steadily extending wiretapping capabilities onto the Internet. This effort is made in the name of national security, but building architected security breaches into a communications network carries real risks. In a world that includes al-Qaeda and Hurricane Katrina, does this increased wiretapping capability make us safer? We will examine what real security needs are in a post-9/11 world.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

Conference Reception

REFEREED PAPERS

Vx32: Lightweight User-level Sandboxing on the x86
Bryan Ford and Russ Cox, MIT CSAIL

LeakSurvivor: Towards Safely Tolerating Memory Leaks for Garbage-Collected Languages
Yan Tang, Qi Gao, and Feng Qin, The Ohio State University

Perspectives: Improving SSH-style Host Authentication with Multi-path Probing
Dan Wendlandt, David G. Andersen, and Adrian Perrig, Carnegie Mellon University

Spectator: Detection and Containment of JavaScript Worms
Benjamin Livshits and Weidong Cui, Microsoft Research

INVITED TALKS

Using Hadoop for Webscale Computing
Ajay Anand, Yahoo!

Apache Hadoop is an open source implementation of a distributed filesystem and map-reduce programming model combined into one package. Hadoop scales smoothly from tens to thousands of computers. The framework allows engineers to harness the power of these clusters very simply, taking advantage of three major features:

• A reliable, non-hardware-based distributed filesystem: Hadoop DFS runs on any number of nodes, taking advantage of their combined storage to manage replication and recovery from failure.
• A simple, functional programming model: Hadoop Map-Reduce is a parallelized implementation of a very simple programming methodology first popularized by the functional programming group in the 1970s.
• Infrastructure to aid in the automation of job execution: Hadoop automates bringing user code to the data, and it manages parallel execution and handles node failure.

The talk will provide an overview of Apache Hadoop, along with examples of how this infrastructure is being used at Yahoo! and other organizations today.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

REFEREED PAPERS

A Compacting Real-Time Memory Management System
Hannes Payer, Christoph Kirsch, Ana Sokolova, Silviu S. Craciunas, Horst Stadler, and Robert Staudinger, University of Salzburg

Prefetching with Adaptive Cache Culling for Striped Disk Arrays
Sung Hoon Baek and Kyu Ho Park, KAIST

Context Aware Prefetching at the Storage Server
Gokul Soundararajan, Madalin Mihailescu, and Cristiana Amza, University of Toronto

INVITED TALKS

Google Hacking: Making Competitive Intelligence Work for You
Tom Bowers, Kaspersky Lab

With more than 200 million searches a day, Google offers users a quick and easy solution to finding information with just a flick of a finger. Today, everything from online newspapers to public documents and search engines is being used to perform competitive intelligence analysis, and it's easier than ever. But how much information is truly available? Can it be used against you and your business? Is it possible to use simple, everyday tools like Google to gain—or forfeit—economic advantage over your competitors?

This presentation will examine Google hacking and how today's online search engines can double as competitive intelligence tools. Audience members will learn how, using basic Google tools, they can conduct competitive intelligence searches, analyze their information online, identify leaks, and minimize their business risk.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

REFEREED PAPERS

Free Factories: Unified Infrastructure for Data Intensive Web Services
Alexander Wait Zaranek, Ward Vandewege, Tom Clegg, and George M. Church, Harvard University

Wide-Scale Data Stream Management
Dionysios Logothetis and Kenneth Yocum, University of California, San Diego

Experiences with Client-based Speculative Remote Display
John R. Lange and Peter A. Dinda, Northwestern University; Samuel Rossoff, University of Victoria

INVITED TALKS

Current and Next-Generation Digital Forensics
Golden G. Richard, University of New Orleans

Digital evidence exists on a wide variety of devices, from traditional computers to PDAs, voice recorders, game consoles, and cell phones. This talk provides an introduction to digital forensics, the art (and science) of discovering and preserving digital evidence, from two perspectives: digital investigation and research. The talk covers basic concepts, best practices, common data-hiding techniques, investigative challenges, and what is (and isn't) recoverable. Most important, it examines the major limitations of current-generation tools and discusses next-generation approaches that may help investigators to deal with the ever-increasing size and complexity of forensics targets. These approaches cover a wide spectrum, from applying research in bioinformatics to the use of parallel and distributed architectures, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), advanced file-carving techniques, and tools for live investigation.

THE GURU IS IN

Please check back here soon for program updates.

Plenary Closing Session

The Columbia Accident Investigation and Returning NASA's Space Shuttle to Flight
Matthew Melis, NASA Glenn Research Center

On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry, resulting in loss of the vehicle and its seven crew members. Over the next several months, an extensive investigation of the accident took place, involving a nationwide team of experts from NASA, industry, and academia that spanned dozens of technical disciplines. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB), a group of experts assembled to conduct an investigation independent of NASA, concluded in August 2003 that the most likely cause of the loss of Columbia and its crew was a breach in the left wing leading-edge Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC) thermal protection system. The breach was initiated by the impact of thermal insulating foam that had separated from the orbiter's external fuel tank 81 seconds into the mission's launch. During reentry, this breach allowed superheated air to penetrate behind the leading edge and erode the aluminum structure of the left wing, which ultimately led to the breakup of the orbiter. The findings of the CAIB were supported by ballistic impact tests, which simulated the physics of external tank foam impact on the RCC wing leading-edge material. These tests ranged from fundamental material characterization tests to full-scale orbiter wing leading edge tests.

Following the accident investigation, NASA spent the next 18 months focused on returning the shuttle safely to flight. In order to fully evaluate all potential impact threats from the many debris sources during ascent, NASA instituted a significant impact-testing program. The results from these tests led to the validation of high-fidelity computer models capable of predicting actual or potential shuttle impact events. These models were used in the certification of STS-114, NASA's Return to Flight Mission, as safe to fly.

Matthew Melis served for nearly five years as technical lead of the NASA Glenn Ballistic Impact Team for both the Columbia Accident Investigation and NASA's Return to Flight program. In a presentation rich with imagery and high-speed motion pictures, Mr. Melis will provide a look into the inner workings of the space shuttle and a behind-the-scenes perspective on the impact analysis and testing conducted to identify the cause of the Columbia accident and enhance safety for NASA's future shuttle missions. In addition, highlights from recent shuttle missions will be presented.