[apologies for cross-postings]

The Workshop on Virtualization in High­-Performance Cloud Computing (VHPC) <https://vhpc.org/> is an international forum bringing together researchers and industrial practitioners facing the challenges posed by virtualization in HPC/Cloud scenarios, in order to foster discussion, collaboration, mutual exchange of knowledge and experience, enabling research to ultimately provide novel solutions for virtualized computing systems of tomorrow.

The 18th edition of VHPC will be held on May 25th, 2023, jointly with the ISC High-Performance 2023 <https://www.isc-hpc.com/> conference and exhibition in Hamburg (Germany), and it welcomes contributions on the research topics detailed below. Paper submissions are due on April 19th. Accepted papers will be published on Springer LNCS series, and indexed by Scopus, among others.
Workshop Overview

Containers and virtualization technologies constitute key enabling factors for flexible resource management in modern data centers, and particularly in cloud environments. Cloud providers need to seamlessly manage complex infrastructures, to support the highly dynamic and heterogeneous workloads customers deploy. Similarly, HPC environments have been increasingly adopting techniques that enable flexible management of vast computing and networking resources, close to marginal provisioning cost, which is unprecedented in the history of scientific and commercial computing.

Various virtualization-containerization technologies contribute to the overall picture in different ways: machine virtualization, with its capability to enable consolidation of multiple under­utilized servers with heterogeneous software and operating systems (OSes), and its capability to live­-migrate a fully operating virtual machine (VM) with a very short downtime, enables novel and dynamic ways to manage physical servers; OS-­level virtualization (i.e., containerization), with its capability to isolate multiple user­-space environments and to allow for their co­existence within the same OS kernel, promises to provide many of the advantages of machine virtualization with high levels of responsiveness and performance; lastly, unikernels provide for many virtualization benefits with a minimized OS/library surface. I/O virtualization, in turn, allows physical network interfaces to exchange traffic with multiple VMs or containers; network virtualization, with its capability to create logical network overlays independently from the underlying physical topology, is another fundamental enabling technology for Cloud/HPC infrastructures. Last, storage virtualization needs to evolve to support increasingly demanding requirements in terms of performance and reliability for the managed application data.

Topics of Interest

The VHPC program committee solicits original, high-quality submissions related to virtualization across the entire software stack with a special focus on the intersection of HPC, containers-virtualization and cloud computing, focusing on the following major topics:

 * HPC on Containers and VMs;
 * Containerized applications with OS-level virtualization;
 * Lightweight applications with Unikernels;
 * HPC-as-a-Service.

Each of these major topics encompasses design/architecture, management, performance management, modeling and configuration/tooling, leading to the following detailed, but non-necessarily exhaustive, list of topics of interest:

Design / Architecture:

 * Containers and OS-level virtualization (LXC, Docker, rkt, Singularity, Shifter, i.a.)
 * Hypervisor support for heterogeneous resources (GPUs, co-processors, FPGAs, etc.)
 * Hypervisor extensions to mitigate side-channel attacks([micro-]architectural timing attacks, privilege escalation)
 * VM & Container trust and security models
 * Multi-environment coupling, system software supporting in-situ analysis with HPC simulation
 * Cloud reliability, fault-tolerance and high-availability
 * Cloud-based quantum compute services
 * Energy-efficient and power-aware virtualization
 * Containers inside VMs with hypervisor isolation
 * Virtualization support for emerging memory and storage technologies
 * Lightweight/specialized operating systems in conjunction with virtual machines
 * Hypervisor support for heterogeneous resources (GPUs, co-processors, FPGAs, etc.)
 * Unikernels and use cases for virtualized HPC environments
 * Formal definition and verification of hypervisors and virtualization system properties
 * ARM-based hypervisors, ARM virtualization extensions

Management:

 * Container and VM management for HPC and cloud environments
 * HPC services integration, services to support HPC
 * Service and on-demand scheduling & resource management
 * Dedicated workload management with VMs or containers
 * Workflow coupling with VMs and containers
 * Unikernels and lightweight VM application management
 * Environments and tools for operating containerized environments (batch, orchestration)
 * Models for non-HPC workload provisioning on HPC resources

Performance Measurements and Modeling:

 * Performance improvements for, or driven by, unikernels
 * Optimizations of virtual machine monitor platforms and hypervisors
 * Scalability analysis of VMs and/or containers at large scale
 * Performance measurement, modeling and monitoring of virtualized/cloud workloads
 * Virtualization in supercomputing environments, HPC clusters, HPC in the cloud
 * Energy-efficient deployment of high-performance, ultra-low latency and real-time workloads in cloud infrastructures
 * Modeling, control and isolation of end-to-end performance for parallel & distributed cloud/HPC applications

Configuration / Tooling:

 * Tool support for unikernels: configuration/build environments, debuggers, profilers
 * Job scheduling/control/policy and container placement in virtualized environments
 * Measuring and controlling "OS/Virtualization noise"
 * Operating MPI in containers/VMs and Unikernels
 * GPU virtualization operationalization

Organization

The workshop will be one day in length, composed of 20 min paper presentations, each followed by 10 min discussion sections, plus lightning talks that are limited to 5 minutes. Presentations may be accompanied by interactive demonstrations.

For more information and detailed paper submission instructions, refer to the VHPC'23 webpage: https://vhpc.org/

Important Dates

 * Mar 12th, 2023: Abstract registration (/rolling abstract registrations//always open/)
 * Mar 19th, 2023: Paper submission deadline (/Springer LNCS/)
 * Apr 15th, 2023: Acceptance notification
 * May 25th, 2023: Workshop Day
 * Jun TBA, 2023: Camera-ready version due (/post-workshop/)

General Chairs

 * Michael Alexander, Institute of Science and Technology, Austria
 * Anastassios Nanos, Nubificus Ltd., UK
 * Tommaso Cucinotta, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy

--
Tommaso Cucinotta, Associate Professor of Computer Engineering, PhD
Head of the Real-Time Systems Laboratory (ReTiS)
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy
http://retis.sssup.it/~tommaso/eng/research.html