I just got back from the second annual VMAP workshop hosted at VMware's annual user conference, VMworld in Las Vegas. The user conference boasted over 14,000 attendees - which included our members, student posters and university representatives using virtualization to support complex and often diverse campus infrastructures. I think the VMAP workshop attendees would agree that the conference was "eye opening" to say the least! The countless number of vendors developing software solutions to leverage virtualization was staggering. Be on the lookout for VMAP member blogs talking about their experiences from the conference. We'll also send a link out to the poster abstracts and presentation materials in the next couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, a few thoughts of mine about this year's event...
The student posters got first-hand experience explaining their scientific approach to complex problems to industry participants at VMworld's opening reception on Monday night. I enjoyed listening to our rising stars in academia trying to distill complicated problems into a language that the non-scientific, yet technical, observers can understand. Several industry attendees at the conference told me that they were pleased to see students able to present their ideas in a way that allowed them to appreciate how hard some of these problems are to solve.
At this year's full-day workshop, we had faculty from Georgia Tech, Columbia University, Northeastern, PolyTechnic/NYU, Cambridge University, George Mason, and University of Toronto. Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Olin College of Engineering were also represented by our student posters. Industry researchers from VMware and AMD were also present.
After lunch, which included a closer look at the student posters, we had three terrific speakers. We invited each speaker based on their varied use of virtualization at their respective schools. Ada Gavrilovska of Georgia Institute of Technology discussed her work on managed virtualized platforms. This work began using Xen and is now using VMware's ESX source code as a proof of concept to validate performance statistics of power management techniques. Discussion after her talk highlighted the question of cloud vs. grid and how large clusters should be leveraged for research and computation.
Jeffrey Dwoskin of Princeton University, talked with the group about his use of virtualization to test his security architecture research. As Jeff explained, virtualization software resolves the need to reproduce hardware environments to test the architecture he is developing.
Jason Nieh of Columbia University came from a completely different perspective - using and teaching virtualization in computer science. Jason painted an interesting picture of how Columbia has increased enrollment in the operating systems course over the past nine years and as a result has produced several interesting research projects/papers from students much earlier than typical in their academic careers. He attributes virtualization as a means to get more hands on experience and appreciation for systems. Students are not bogged down with crashing machines when doing kernel hacking and they don't have to worry about complexities of different operating systems. Jason also talked about the success of Columbia's first virtualization course offered this past spring. A complete set of the materials from this course can be found in govirtual.org under courseware.
Overall, I'd have to say that I am quite pleased with how our second annual event turned out and I'll share some additional thoughts on discussions from the workshop in my next blog. Also, I want to extend a special thanks to Melissa Wood, VMAP Program Manager extraordinaire, for her tireless work pulling together the poster session and workshop. For those who didn't know, she also helped me coordinate the attendance and schedules of over 200 engineers from VMware for the VMworld conference. Hats off to you Mel!
