Peter Dinda & Akhil Guliani Win Best Paper Award at 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering

Their research displays the concept of a shadow process simplifying the design and implementation of virtualization services such as system call forwarding and device file-level device virtualization.

Prof. Peter Dinda and EECS Alum Akhil Guliani

Prof. Peter Dinda and EECS Alum Akhil Guliani (MS 16' in CE, Advised by Prof. Dinda) have been awarded the Best Paper Award for their research, titled “Dark Shadows: User-level Guest/Host Linux Process Shadowing” at the 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E 2017), held April 4-7, 2017 in Vancouver, CA.

Advised by Prof. Seda Ogrenci-Memik, Guliani is currently a PhD student in Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He graduated with an MS in Computer Engineering from Northwestern University in 2016 and since 2012, has held a BE in Instrumentation and Control Engineering from Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India. Guliani's current research focus is in resource management in operating systems, as well as, currently working on power aware computing systems, which is a continuation of his Masters Research thesis where he found ways to model the thermal behaviour of a system using machine learning methods.

Paper Abstract: The concept of a shadow process simplifies the design and implementation of virtualization services such as system call forwarding and device file-level device virtualization. A shadow process on the host mirrors a process in the guest at the level of the virtual and physical address space, terminating in the host physical addresses. Previous shadow process mechanisms have required changes or additions (modules) to the guest and host kernels. We describe a shadow process technique that is implemented entirely at user level in both the guest and the host. In our technique, we refer to the host shadow process as a dark shadow as it arranges its own elements to avoid conflicting with the guest process’s elements. We demonstrate the utility of dark shadows by using our implementation to create system call forwarding and device file-level device virtualization tools that are compact and simple. Our implementation of dark shadows will be made available and should be readily applicable to most hypervisors or container systems.

The IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E) conference series seeks to provide a high-quality and comprehensive forum, where researchers and practitioners can exchange information on engineering principles, enabling technologies, and practical experiences as related to cloud computing. By bringing together experts that work on different levels of the cloud stack—systems, storage, networking, platforms, databases, and applications, IC2E will offer an end-to-end view on the challenges and technologies in cloud computing, foster research that addresses the interaction between different layers of the stack, and ultimately help shape the future of cloud-transformed business and society.

IC2E 2017 will aim to offer an excellent mix of technical presentations. In addition to research and industrial paper presentations, there will be keynote talks. The program will also include tutorials and industrial practitioners' talks covering timely topics. This year's IC2E conference will also include a doctoral symposium and affiliated workshops focusing on cutting-edge topics that are relevant to the current cloud research and development.

Prof. Peter Dinda Accepts Best Paper Award

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