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  • 2011
    • March
      • Doctor Bletsch
        03/30/11
        Congratulations! Tyler Bletsch successfully defended his PhD dissertation. He is now entitled to all the rights, privileges, and honor thereunto appertaining.

        and there was much rejoicing

  • 2010
    • December
      • JOP paper in ASIACCS 2011
        12/08/10
        Congratulations, Tyler.

        "Jump-Oriented Programming: A New Class of Code-Reuse Attack" by Tyler Bletsch, Xuxian Jiang, Vince Freeh and Zhenkai Liang was accepted to ASIACCS. Acceptance rate is 16% (35/217).

    • April
  • 2009
    • December
    • November
      • Boot or install any Linux from the network with boot.kernel.org
        11/20/09
        My last post was on gPXE (quite a while ago), and I talked about all the amazing possibilities that come from a network boot-loader with that much intelligence.

        It looks like these benefits are starting to be realized in a big way. Recently, kernel.org (which hosts the Linux kernel, as w

    • June
      • gPXE: Modernized Ethernet boot
        06/09/09
        I just read up on gPXE, which is an open source alternative to proprietary PXE bootloaders. It supports booting a variety of environments and can be flashed onto NICs or chainloaded from regular PXE.

        What struck me was this: it supports HTTP download of both gPXE scripts and binary image

    • March
      • Into the cloud: a conversation with Russ Daniels
        02/10/09
        Ars Technica is carrying an interview with Russ Daniels, HP's CTO and VP of Cloud Services Strategy. He discusses a practical definition for cloud computing and distinguishes it from utility computing.

        Part 1
        Part 2

  • 2008
    • December
      • Arguments against auto-scaling compute capacity in cloud computing
        12/07/08
        We've been interested in applying power-aware techniques to virtualized compute grids, including so-called "cloud computing" grids. A key part of this work is dynamically scaling the amount of compute capacity based on load, which in some cases can be done automatically.

        T

    • October
      • Overall benefits of CPU power savings in a data center
        10/06/08
        I found an article that shows interesting analysis of power savings in a data center. In a 5,000-square-foot data center, a 1-watt reduction at the server-component level (processor, memory, hard disk, etc.) results in an additional 1.84-watt savings in the power supply, power distribution system,

    • July
      • Flash based storage not so energy efficient?
        07/03/08
        Tom's Hardware tested the power and performance of current Solid State Disks (SSDs) both in terms of performance and power. While the performance numbers were as expected, it turns out that the flash based drives' energy utilization is no better than a traditional 7200 RPM hard disk for a

    • May
      • Ubuntu 8.04 released
        05/01/08
        Ubuntu 8.04 was released earlier this week. You can get it from one of the official mirrors or from our unofficial mirror. This is a "Long Term Support" (LTS) release, meaning that updates will be available for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years for servers.

    • March
      • AMD Barcelona architecture rundown
        03/17/08
        The Barcelona (aka "K10") microarchitecture is the latest design from AMD for both the server and desktop markets. The Phenom is the quad-core desktop variant, the Athlon X2 series includes the dual-core variant, and the 23xx and 83xx Opterons are the quad-core server varient.

    • March
      • "The Coming Utility Computing Revolution"
        02/11/08
        This recent "Innovations" article highlights "utility computing", the idea that virtualization, shared storage, and other technologies will come together to commoditize business computing.

        While I agree with the general idea, the author predicts that this will margin

      • Comparison of memory model between Xen and OpenVZ
        02/06/08
        The article explains the difference in detail. Now, I can understand why it's too difficult to run Java Web server on OpenVZ for evaluating TPCW benchmarks.

  • 2007
    • October
      • Power management research at Berkeley
        10/19/07
        There is some good information about adaptive power management at Berkeley. It appears to be a position statement/paper in construction arguing for power management in data centers.

      • Ubuntu 7.10 released
        10/18/07
        Ubuntu 7.10 was released today. You can get it from one of the official mirrors or from our unofficial mirror. Notable new features include:

        - Improved support for multiple monitors, rotatable monitors, etc.
        - Plug and play printer detection
        - NTFS writing support out-of-box
    • September
    • August
      • Citrix acquires XenSource, VMware goes public
        08/16/07
        By way of Ars Technica, we find that Citrix (whose software provides virtual Windows desktop environments accessible anywhere, among other things) has purchased XenSource, the commercial arm of the Xen hypervisor virtualization project. Hopefully they'll make it less of a pain to use and deplo

    • July
      • Linux Gains Two New Virtualization Solutions
        07/21/07
        By way of slashdot, we find that the Linux kernel (2.6.23 and up) now sports three virtualization techniques out-of-box: KVM, Xen (just merged), and Lguest (also recently merged).

        Lguest in particular looks interesting, as it doesn't require virtualization hardware support (like KVM)

      • Power Plays: How power consumption will shape the future of computing
        07/01/07
        This Ars Technica article spotlights the development of power-aware technologies at the chip, system, network, and data center levels. It analyzes recent developments in terms of granularity, i.e. the frequency of reaction. Overall, a well written article.

    • June
      • Development and Optimization Techniques for Multi-Core Processors
        06/27/07
        This article talks about the performance issues on multi-core system. It basically recommends to use the parallelism, such as OpenMP, in order to take full advantage of it. It also gives the common issues limiting the performance. I think it's a very good article to summarize idea.

        h

      • Summary of Power-aware computing research in OpenMP applications
        06/19/07
        Here are the paper list proposing research using the OpenMP library in Power-aware computing area.

        1. Chun Liu, et. al, "Exploiting Barriers to Optimize Power Consumption of CMPs", IPDPS 2005.
        This work is to use slack time among processors. By figuring out stall time at th

      • Hybrid OpenMP / MPI programming
        06/12/07
        This presentation file explains why the hybrid of MPI/OpenMP programming is required.
        It comes with the examples and strategies.
        Also, it talks about when the hybrid mode performs better.

        http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/services/tr

        Also, here are the paper list focusing o

    • May
      • ext3cow - A file system that preserves the past
        05/02/07
        The ext3cow file system has been released for the 2.6 Linux kernel. This extension to ext3 adds "copy on write" (cow) functionality, which in turn allows the user to view the file system as it existed in the past. Unlike fixed checkpointing, this means that a user could dial in any time

    • April
      • Haha
        04/24/07
        Three tenured professors were having a dialogue. The first argued that it is wrong to kill sheep because they provide us with milk and wool. The second argued that it is wrong to kill cows because they provide us with milk and plow our fields. The third argued that it is wrong to kill pigs because t

      • Using the S3 sleep state, even on a server
        04/23/07
        By way of slashdot, this Exoid article details how to make sure Windows uses the S3 sleep state, even for an always-on server. Also linked is this handy reference to the possible ACPI sleep states.

        Perhaps something like this could be developed into a vehicle for low-utilization servers?

      • A great OS/systems web site
        04/20/07
        Clarkson University Prof Jeanna Matthews has one of the best round ups of system papers. It comes as no surprise that she received her training at Berkeley. Kudos to her.

      • Ubuntu 7.04 released
        04/19/07
        Ubuntu 7.04 was released today. You can get it from one of the official mirrors or from our unofficial mirror.

        Okay, maybe this isn't "research" news, but I still like it.

      • The Parallel Workloads Archive
        04/19/07
        The Parallel Workloads Archive is an archive of real workload submission and execution data from real clusters from 1993 to the present. It supports a unified log file format (the Standard Workload Format, SWF) so that data from diverse sources can be analyzed together. With over 3 million jobs fr

      • Welcome to the OS Research News blog!
        04/12/07
        This is the inaugural post of the Operating Systems Research News blog. We hope to report on interesting developments in OS research, specifically within the domains of power-aware, high-performance, and commercial computing, as well as storage technology. This blog will cover industry and research