syslog
7Apr/110

The Philosophy of Trust and Cloud Computing

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

The Philosophy of Trust and Cloud Computing
April 5/6, Corpus Christi, Cambridge
Sponsored by Microsoft Research

Richard Harper (MSR) and Alex Oliver (Cambridge) outlined
the goals of the meeting, and everyone introduced themselves - the
majority of attendees were either in Social Science/Anthropology or
Philosophy, with a few industrials and a couple of technical people
from Computing (networks&security).

The talks were mostly in the social science style
(people literally "read" papers, rather than powerpoint), so one had
to concentrate a bit more than usual, rather than looking at
bulletpoints and catching up on email/facebook.

31Mar/110

NSDI 2011 Day 2 LiveBlog

Posted by Chris Smowton

Hey all,

Today's LiveBlog is even liver: Join us on IRC at chat.freenode.net, channel #nsdi11 (go here for web IRC access).

30Mar/110

4th Winter School in Hot Topics in Distributed Computing

Posted by Narseo

Last week I attended the 4th Winter School in Hot Topic in Distributed Computing organised by INRIA. The winter school was located in La Plagne (a classic ski resort in the French Alps) so good food and astonishing landscapes were guaranteed.

The winter school program was structured in 2 sessions per day. This year, the invited researchers were Shafi Goldwasser from MIT, Timothy Roscoe from ETH Zurich, Nir Shavit from Oracle and Tel Aviv University, Luis Rodrigues from INESC-ID, André Seznec from INRIA, Pablo Rodríguez from Telefónica Research and Serge Abitebou from INRIA. The talks covered different topics of distributed computing and the slides might be available soon in the winter school website. Nevertheless, I strongly recommend checking the webpage of each speaker for further details about their work. In addition to these sessions, two doctoral sessions allowed  PhD students to show their work and to get some valuable feedback.

29Mar/110

End to end arguments in Virtualised System Design

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

We've come a long way in virtualisation (some would say around in a big circle, but that's a different blog entry). Now we have routine cloud services (commercial, public and private) based on VMs all over the place. We also have routine VPNs, at least in most layer 2 net setups, and (at much greater expense) as commercial offerings between large corporate sites.

What virtualisation does is combine two properties - statistical multiplexing (resource pooling) together with isolation (privacy). Some VMs and VPNs allow you to tune the amount of resource pooling (for a price) that you are prepared to tolerate.

What seems to be lacking is a seamless integration of VM and VPN, and it seems that it is not a trivial thing to solve in a clean way. Obviously, one can simply map a service (e.g. a large Skywriting app running on a set of data centers) to a VPN. But that isn't terribly useful in general. More typically if there are resource pooling design goals, they are more likely, in the network layer to lie in having a wide set of user demands from outside of the VPN (e.g. a hose or sink tree).

So what should virtualised host+net look like as a building block, and what should the tools be to "provision" such things in an expressive, checkable, and simple way?

 

Seems like this is a good current challenge... ...

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18Mar/110

St Patrick’s Day

Posted by Jon Crowcroft

I'm just reading this brilliant book by Lewis Hyde about the idea of the gift, & it occurs to me that Zuckerberg's crime is to take social data we give one another, and reduce it by monetizing/commoditizing it....this is, I suppose what Jaron Lanier says in "you are not a gadget", too...

See also here and here.

Meanwhile, I was at the EPSRC's "wrapup" workshop for the WINES programme of research - this was trying to see if there are lessons in how this large managed programme of research on wireless and intelligent sensor network systems worked so well - it started with a Grand Challenge, and isn't ending with the funding, but lives on in quite a few other projects - specifically in Cambridge, we have the Intelligent Energy Aware Networks project, plus a giant IKC in smart infrastructures...for example....the main thing seemed to be that the community was a real one with common interests and the challenge was very well timed in terms of feasibility and technology maturity.

Anyhow, we may try and create a new (but different) programme by trying to repeat the circumstances somehow - one area this might look at is the design of networked systems for supporting human behaviours rather than just supporting information exchange.