Third Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, March 21–23, 2018

Many thanks to all those who attended! Programme with abstracts and slides where available are posted below. The full Call for Papers and Participation is available here.

Location & Transport

The workshop will be held at the Macdonald Linden Hall Golf & Country Club, Northumberland. We are providing coach transport between the venue and Newcastle city centre (Urban Sciences Building, 1 Science Square, Science Central, NE4 5TG) as follows:

March 21, 17:00: A coach will depart the Urban Sciences Building to Linden Hall.
March 23, 13:45: A coach will depart Linden Hall to the Urban Sciences Building.

Note that this is not a shuttle service but a single coach in each direction. For those travelling on from Newcastle after the workshop by train, we would suggest booking a train after 15:30 to allow for delays.

Thanks to generous contributions from our sponsors, accommodation will be included in the registration fee (free for students, £100 otherwise).

Programme

Wednesday, March 21

16:45 Please report to the ground floor reception of the Urban Sciences Building, Newcastle

17:00 Coach leaves the Urban Sciences Building, Newcastle

18:00 Check-in at Linden Hall

18:30 for 19:00 Dinner

Thursday, March 22

09:00-09:20 Welcome & Intro (Paul Watson, Richard Mortier)

09:20-11:00 Networking & Cloud (Derek McAuley)

“P4Debug: A Framework for Debugging Programmable Data Planes”, Pietro Bressana (Universita’ della Svizzera italiana), Robert Soulé (Universita’ della Svizzera italiana, Barefoot Networks), Noa Zilberman (University of Cambridge) [abstract] [pdf]
“Another heavy hitter detection problem”, Salvator Galea, Gianni Antichi (University of Cambridge) [abstract] [pdf]
“Load Balancing Real-Time Physics for Cloud Based Video Game Delivery”, Alexander Brown, Graham Morgan (Newcastle University) [abstract] [pdf] [video (mp4)]
“FaRM and MVCC”, Alex Shamis (Microsoft Research) [abstract]
“ABC: Adaptive Brokerage for the Cloud”, Abdessalam Elhabbash, Yehia Elkhatib, Gordon Blair (Lancaster University) [abstract] [pdf]

11:00-11:30 Coffee

11:30-12:30 Applications & Data Science (Mark Little)

“Visualizing Urban IoT Using Cloud Supercomputing”, Nicolas Holliman, Manu Antony, Stephen Dowsland, Mark Turner (Newcastle University) [abstract] [pdf]
“Intelligent applications on OpenShift from prototype to production”, Rebecca Simmonds, Mike McCune (Red Hat) [abstract] [pdf]
“And what would you do with ten thousand Raspberry Pis?”, Jeremy Singer, Anna Lito, Michala Herry Herry (University of Glasgow) [abstract] [pdf]

12:30-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:20 Hardware (Andy Stanford Clark)

“Efficient Cross-architecture Hardware Virtualisation”, Tom Spink (University of Edinburgh) [abstract] [pdf]
“Systems in an Era of Custom Hardware”, Aleksandar Dragojevic, Junyi Liu (Microsoft (Microsoft) [abstract]
“Challenges in Scaling Up Graph Analytics”, Priyank Faldu, Boris Grot (The University of Edinburgh) [abstract] [pdf]
“Can you trust your I/O?”, A. Theodore Markettos (University of Cambridge) [abstract]

15:20-15:50 Coffee

15:50-17:10 Unikernels & Containers (Paul Watson)

“Towards Tiny Trustworthy Enclaves for Unikernels”, Zahra Tarkhani, Anil Madhavapeddy (University of Cambridge) [abstract] [pdf]
(withdrawn) ~~“Building systems with Rust: Lessons learned”, Marco Caballero (University of Cambridge)~~
“Unikernel support for the deployment of light-weight, self-contained, and latency avoiding services”, Ward Jaradat, Alan Dearle, Jonathan Lewis (University of St Andrews) [abstract] [pdf]
“Containerizing Middleware Applications”, Jonathan Dowland (Red Hat) [abstract] [pdf] [ascii]
“There and back again: a microservices tale”, Mark Little (Red Hat) [abstract] [pdf]

19:00-21:00 Dinner

21:00-22:00 Lightning Talks (Aleksandar Dragojevic)

Short (5 minute) talks on any relevant topic. Contact Aleksandar Dragojevic to offer a title.

Friday, March 23

09:00-10:20 Formal Methods & IoT (Richard Mortier)

“Formal Verification of Spacecraft Control Programs Using a Metalanguage for State Transformers”, Andrey Mokhov, Georgy Lukyanov (Newcastle University), Jakob Lechner (RUAG Space Austria GmbH) [abstract] [pdf]
“Escaping the Triwizard Maze: Reflections on how we reason about Distributed Systems”, Heidi Howard (Cambridge University) [abstract]
“Verifying Application Requirements in Multi-Tenancy Sensor Networks”, Milan Kabáč, Michele Sevegnani, Muffy Calder (University of Glasgow), Julie A. McCann (Imperial College London) [abstract]
“Holistic, Distributed Stream Processing in IoT Environments”, Peter Michalák, Sarah Heaps, Michael Trenell, Paul Watson (Newcastle University) [abstract] [pdf]

10:20-10:50 Coffee

10:50-12:10 Blockchain & Edge (Julie McCann)

“Modern key distribution with ClaimChain”, Bogdan Kulynych (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), Marios Isaakidis (University College London), Carmela Troncoso (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), George Danezis (University College London) [abstract] [pdf]
“Roadmap for future research on Chainspace”, Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Bano Shehar, George Danezis (University College London) [abstract] [pdf]
“Towards Efficient Scheduling for Long Running Applications”, Panagiotis Garefalakis, Jana Giceva, Peter Pietzuch (Imperial College London) [abstract]
(withdrawn) ~~“Resource Management in Large Scale Data Centres Using Machine Learning and Distributed Optimisation”, Javad Zarrin, Evangelia Kalyvianaki (University of Cambridge)~~