Birds of a Feather (BoF) Sessions at DSN 2009

Birds of a Feather sessions provide a gathering place and discussion forum for those interested in the same issues and concepts. BoFs can be organized for sharing ideas on the specific topics, narrow or broad.

They are not workshops or sessions where people present papers, but open, "brainstorming" forums for attendees who want to get together with others to share their current interests, goals, technology, environment, or backgrounds.

BoFs are popular because of their interactive and flexible format and the fact that they offer attendees and technology experts an opportunity to interact at a peer level.

BoF #1
Energy-Efficient Dependability

Alan Wood, Sun Microsystems, USA

Minimizing power consumption has become a very important topic in the design of components, computers, and data centers. Industry analysts predict that, within the next few years, the cost of power will surpass the cost of computational equipment in the data center. Dependability research has not traditionally considered the cost or availability of power to implement the proposed techniques. If redundant equipment was needed for fault-tolerance, it was blithely assumed that the power and other facilities overhead was negligible. That assumption is no longer valid, and dependability research and practice needs to change accordingly.

In this session participants will discuss issues like: What low power-overhead dependability techniques are available? What additional reliability concerns will be created from energy-efficient computing? What can we learn from the laptop and embedded market? What are the dependability concerns with the increasing use of SSD/flash memory in the storage hierarchy, and can they be used to store checkpoints or otherwise improve dependability? Are massive data centers (cloud computing) a massive dependability concern?

BoF #2
Multicore Virtualization for Flexible and Reliable Networks

Varun Sethi, Freescale Semiconductor, India

The emerging communications infrastructure is characterized by a backbone supporting the delivery of highly complex composite services (components like voice video and data) from multiple internet service providers. Such an environment creates challenges for the network operator, who is expected to meet the Quality of Service and Availability requirements.

 

In this session, participants will discuss issues like: How can multicore virtualization aid in meeting the requirements for the next generation communication networks? How can multicore virtualization help in attaining a flexible networking infrastructure, such that it can support dynamic QoS requirements (based on the network service)? How can ISPs leverage the multicore virtualization” advantage to have a flexible infrastructure catering to various customer requirements. How can multicore virtualization aid in meeting high availability requirements for complex composite network services like voice and video?