Performance Evaluation and Analysis

We're happy to announce the 3rd Haifa Cloud Meetup event, brought to you in collaboration with the Systor'2017 (http://www.systor.org/2017/index.html) conference!

This meetup will focus on performance evaluation and analysis, and our guest speakers will be Prof. Erez Zadok (http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~ezk/) (Stony Brook University) and Prof. Avi Mendelson (http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~mendlson/) (Technion).

Please pay attention that this meetup irregularly takes place after noon, piggybacking the closing session of the conference. Also note that talks will be given in English.

The next (4th) meetup will return to "normal" meetup hours. Please stay tuned as we're already working on that :)

Agenda

(14:00-14:30) Gathering, registration

(14:30-15:20) "Oh, what a tangled web we weave: practice and deception in system analysis", by Professor Erez Zadok (http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~ezk/), Stony Brook University, Computer Science Department
Analyzing computer systems through benchmarking is notoriously difficult and hard to reproduce, often due their highly non-linear and "non-deterministic" nature. In this talk, I will overview the evolution of computer system analysis, and specifically storage systems, described often through my own career. I will demonstrate which practices are better than others, and how even the state-of-the-art techniques can be inadvertently (or perhaps purposely) misused to reach almost any desired conclusion. I will show a few real examples that stumped us over the years, and how this old dog continues to learn new tricks. Finally, I will offer advice to those who are considering a career that includes computer system analysis and benchmarking.

(15:20-15:40) Break
Mingling and informal discussion, refreshments will be served on the terrace.

(15:40-16:30) "Power and performance breakdown of server applications", by Professor Avi Mendelson (http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~mendlson/), Technion and NTU
All modern computer architectures provide the hardware counter capabilities for measuring performance and power. Thus, using them in a smart way is still not trivial. In this talk I will discuss the different "counting capabilities" of different cores and extend the discussion to smart methods and algorithms for using them. In particular, I will discuss understanding the performance and power bottlenecks of server and cloud applications.

About the Speakers

Professor Erez Zadok (http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~ezk/) researches systems, with a specialty in file systems, storage, and security. He studies operating systems and file systems from many aspects: security, efficiency, energy use, scalability, reliability, portability, survivability, usability, ease-of-use, versatility, flexibility, and more. Special attention is given to balancing five often-conflicting aspects of computer systems: performance, reliability, energy use, security, and ease-of-use. Since joining the faculty of Stony Brook in 2001, Zadok and his group in the Filesystems and Storage Lab (FSL) developed many file systems and operating system extensions; examples include a highly-secure cryptographic file system, a portable versioning file system, a tracing file system useful for detecting intrusions, a replaying file system useful for forensics, a snapshotting and sandboxing file system, a namespace unification file system, an anti-virus file system, an integrity-checking file system, a compiler to convert user-level C code to in-kernel efficient yet safe code, stackable file system templates, and more. Zadok's research has been supported by several NSF grants including an NSF CAREER award, two IBM Faculty awards, two NetApp awards, and several equipment gifts. Zadok is the winner of the 2004 Computer Science Department bi-annual Graduate Teaching Award, the winner of the 2006 Computer Science Department bi-annual Research Excellence Award, and a recipient of the 2008 SUNY Chancellor's Excellence in Teaching award. Zadok's lab exposes students to the internals of over a dozen different operating systems. Zadok co-chaired several conferences and is on the steering committee of some (e.g., ACM SYSTOR, USENIX FAST), as well as on the editorial board of ACM TOS. Zadok is the author of "Linux NFS and Automounter Administration" (Sybex, 2001). He has published several dozen conference and journal articles in the past few years---in IEEE, ACM, and Usenix venues; three papers won awards. Zadok is named inventor on three U.S. patents.

Professor Avi Mendelson (http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~mendlson/) is a visiting Professor at the Technion, Israel and NTU university Singapore. He split most of his professional life between academia and industry (Intel, National Semiconductors, Microsoft). His main areas of interest are: computer architecture, (real-time) operating systems, heterogeneous systems and hardware security. Currently, Avi serves on the Board-of-Governors of the IEEE computer society.