[hpc-announce] CFP: Cloud at MICRO Workshop, Online event, Deadline: September 18, 2021

[I-hsin Chung]

[Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this message]

Cloud at MICRO Workshop
Held in conjunction with IEEE Micro 2021
Monday October 18, 2021 from 1 - 4pm EDT (7 – 10pm CET)

Paper submission deadline: September 18, 2021 (AOE).

EasyChair link for paper submission: 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cloudmicro21

More details can be found at: https://cloudmicroworkshop.github.io/

*** COVID-19 Updates: Cloud at MICRO will allow authors of accepted papers to 
present and participate via pre-recorded presentation if they wish to do 
so. ***

Over the past decade, Cloud Computing has transformed the computing 
industry. Economies of scale, financial and technical advantages of 
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and the rise of mobile computing have 
combined to make Cloud Computing popular for an increasingly broad set of 
workloads. Remote work and the pandemic further accelerated these powerful 
industry trends. Many of the largest installed computing resources 
nowadays are now run by Cloud Hyperscalers.

There has been little reported work on investigating requirements of Cloud 
hardware or Cloud system design. The original Cloud value proposition of 
deploying efficient ways to use general-purpose (e.g., commodity) servers 
rather than customized or specialized hardware might be the reason behind 
the limited reported research on Cloud hardware. While use of 
general-purpose servers may have been true at the outset of Cloud 
Computing, the Cloud usage model has been evolving from single tenant 
bare-metal servers and VMs to multi-tenant systems using containers and 
now to microservices. Each usage model has different implications and 
requirements on the design of compute, network, and storage components. 
Multi-tenancy usage models demand zero-trust architectures that elevate 
security and isolation as first-class design constraints. Meanwhile, the 
slowing of Moore's Law and the dramatic growth of compute intensive AI 
workloads and Cloud-based HPC have spurred innovation in accelerators and 
offloading compute from the CPUs.  As a consequence, systems requirements 
and design needs for Cloud Computing are becoming increasingly different 
from the requirements that have driven the development of traditional 
servers by hardware vendors, so that Cloud Hyperscalers are increasingly 
customizing and building their own systems and devices across the spectrum 
of compute, acceleration, network, storage, and security. Cloud 
architectures are adopting, and in some cases pioneering, a variety of 
compute devices for better performance and workload isolation. The future 
of Cloud and IaaS is evolving rapidly, in particular when considering the 
introduction of potentially transformative technologies on the horizon, 
such as Quantum Computing.

This workshop is intended to bring together researchers, developers and 
practitioners from academia and industry, to share experiences and 
implementations related to the architecture, design and implementation of 
Cloud systems infrastructure, and encourage discussion of future trends 
and research in these areas. The workshop, held virtually, will include 
invited presentations by experts from Cloud providers, as well as an open 
call for participation. Contributions, in the form of a presentation or 
paper plus presentation, will be solicited in the areas listed below, 
albeit not limited to them.


Cloud at MICRO Workshop will be held in conjunction with IEEE Micro 2021. 
Authors can submit Technical papers (4-6 pages) with preliminary results, 
Position papers (3 pages maximum) on directions for research and 
development, and Abstract (1 page) describing the contents of a 
presentation to only be given orally.

Paper or presentation abstract (in PDF) will be submitted electronically 
via EasyChair. The selected papers and presentation slides will be made 
available online after the conference. Publication in this workshop does 
not preclude later publication at regular conferences, journals, or 
electronic repositories.

Topics of interest:

The topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to the 
following areas:
• Architecture of systems and components optimized for Cloud use cases 
such as VMs, containers, microservices, offloading of management and 
agents, etc.
• Reliability and availability in Cloud systems
• Hardware-based security for Cloud systems
• System composability and hardware disaggregation in Cloud systems
• Use cases and examples of hardware customized for Cloud, emphasizing the 
criteria for needing customized hardware
• Future of Cloud infrastructure, from a hardware perspective: what is 
different, what stays the same
• Network and storage architectures for massive multi-tenancy needed for 
Cloud systems

Important Dates and Deadlines:

• Paper Submission: September 18, 2021 (AOE)
• Notification: October 2, 2021
• Final Submission: October 9, 2021
• Virtual Workshop: October 18, 2021

Organizers:
• Robert M. Senger, IBM Research, USA
• Seetharami R. Seelam, IBM Research, USA
• John Shalf, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA
• Lizy Kurian John, University of Texas at Austin, USA
• Jonathan Appavoo, Boston University, USA
• Anand Sivasubramaniam, Pennsylvania State University
• I-hsin Chung, IBM Research, USA
• Paul Crumley, IBM Research, USA

Submit your paper using EasyChair link: 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cloudmicro21

Follow us on Twitter for the latest updates: 
https://twitter.com/CloudMicro2021
For inquiries: cloudmicroworkshop at gmail.com