{"id":451146,"date":"2017-12-22T11:02:17","date_gmt":"2017-12-22T19:02:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/?p=451146"},"modified":"2017-12-22T11:02:17","modified_gmt":"2017-12-22T19:02:17","slug":"remote-memories-accessed-created-sosp-2017-shanghai-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/blog\/remote-memories-accessed-created-sosp-2017-shanghai-china\/","title":{"rendered":"Remote memories accessed, and created, at SOSP 2017 in Shanghai, China"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I spend my day working on problems related to transactions and accessing memory on one computer using the computer processing unit, or CPU, of another computer, a technology known as remote direct memory access, or RDMA. While the technology has been around for many years in high-performance computing, it is just now gaining widespread traction in the systems research community as a way to maximize operating efficiency in datacenter networks.<\/p>\n

For example, at the recent ACM Symposium on Operating Systems and Principals (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, better known as SOSP 2017, my colleagues at Microsoft Research together with partners in academia presented a paper<\/a> that illustrates how programmable network interface cards, or NICs, can make RDMA more flexible and thus help alleviate a bottleneck at CPUs in datacenters.<\/p>\n

The research represents a novel application of field programmable gate array, or FPGA, technology that is powering Microsoft\u2019s supercomputing substrate known as Project Catapult<\/a> that can accelerate efforts in networking, security, cloud services and artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

The paper was one of eight presented at the conference by Microsoft researchers and software engineers. Other notable papers include the description of Komodo<\/a>, an approach to achieving data and code security that is as robust as Intel Software Guard Extensions but more flexible and updatable; and a high-fidelity, cloud-scale emulator called CrystalNet<\/a> that helps network engineers eliminate network downtime related to routine maintenance and upgrades as well as software bugs and human errors.<\/p>\n

Beyond the conference papers, SOSP 2017 included its first-ever ACM Student Research Competition (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, which was sponsored by Microsoft Research and saw an impressive array of academic research.<\/p>\n

Top prizes went to undergraduate Bandon Zhang from the University of British Columbia for the paper, \u201cPGo: Corresponding a high-level formal specification with its implementation,\u201d and graduate student Jon Gjengset from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the paper, \u201cXylem: flexible and high-performance structured storage via dynamic data flow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also for the first time, the conference was held in Asia \u2013 in Shanghai, China \u2013 and attracted a record number of attendees, many of them local students. This was my first trip to China, and I enjoyed the opportunity to see the sights. On the last night of the conference, I joined a memorable cruise on the Huangpu River which afforded a view of the sun setting on the Shanghai skyline as the buildings lit up for the night and my fellow conference attendees and I talked shop.<\/p>\n

Related<\/strong>:<\/p>\n