INDIS SC18 Workshop Keynotes Announced – Google’s Josh Bailey & Argonne’s Kate Keahey

SC Insider
Tue, 16 Oct 2018 15:33:14 +0000
SC18, Argonne National Laboratory, Chameleon, Faucet, Google, INDIS, Josh Bailey, Kate Keahey, OpenFlow, SCinet

The Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science (INDIS) has just announced its two compelling keynotes for its SC18 workshop – Josh Bailey from Google and Kate Keahey from Argonne National Laboratory on Sunday, Nov. 11th.

Bailey will give a keynote on FAUCET – an open source, production SDN controller – supporting multiple network vendors – and is deployed as part of SC18’s SCinet network among other networks. This talk will be an update on FAUCET’s current status and features and an informal Q&A on the state of OpenFlow implementations in practical production settings.

Below is a YouTube video that Bailey recommends for further background on Google’s use of FAUCET in enterprise networking.

Bailey is a software engineer at Google specializing in SDN and network management and musical applications of high voltages. More information on his research can be found by clicking here.

Kate Keahey

Keahey will give the second keynote on “Chameleon: New Capabilities for Experimental Computer Science“. Chameleon is a large-scale, deeply reconfigurable testbed built specifically to explore a broad range of different state-of-the-art hardware options, assess scalability of systems, and provide conditions that allow deep reconfigurability and isolation so that one user does not impact the experiments of another.

It currently consists of almost 20,000 cores, over 5PBs of total disk space hosted at the University of Chicago and TACC, and leverages 100 Gbps connection between the sites. The hardware includes a large-scale homogenous compute partition, as well a diversity of configurations and architectures including Infiniband, GPUs, FPGAs, storage hierarchies with a mix of HDDs, SDDs, NVRAM, and high memory as well as non-x86 architectures such as ARMs and Atoms.

To support systems experiments, Chameleon provides a configuration system giving users full control of the software stack including root privileges, kernel customization, and console access. To date, Chameleon has supported 2,700+ users working on over 350+ projects.

This talk will describe the evolution of the testbed as well as the current work towards broadening the range of supported experiments. In particular, she will discuss recently deployed hardware and new networking capabilities allowing experimenters to deploy their own switch controllers and experiment with Software Defined Networking (SDN).

Keahey will also describe new capabilities targeted at improving experiment management, monitoring, and analysis as well as tying together testbed features to improve experiment repeatability. Finally, she will outline plans for packaging the Chameleon infrastructure to allow others to reproduce its configuration easily and thereby making the process of configuring a CS testbed more sustainable.

Click here for the latest on this workshop and others and check back for updates.