Discipline Convergence in Networked Systems

Summary

Networked computing systems have reached a watershed, as the amount of networked-data generated by user applications exceeds the processing capability of any single computer. This requires an integrated system design, unlike the traditional layered approaches. This seminar therefore brought together experts from the operating systems, distributed systems, computer architecture, networks, storage and databases communities, to advance the state of the art in discipline convergence in networked systems.

The networking community has advanced in giant leaps, making high bandwidth networking and software-defined networking (SDN) commodity. Furthermore, the advent of network function virtualization (NFV) has started the convergence of computing technologies and networking technologies. The computing community, on the other hand, struggled to overcome power density limitations, resource- efficiency and quality-of-service etc. for cloud computing as well as end host computing (or edge computing), and cannot keep up.

Revolutionary networked system design approaches are now emerging, seeking to increase performance, efficiency and security through the convergence of disciplines: compute, storage and networking. This seminar investigated both hardware and software challenges, and attempted to bridge the gaps between different communities in order to compensate the challenges in some areas with emerging breakthroughs from other areas. Over the course of the 5-day seminar, seventeen presentations were given on various aspects of data center networking. Taking the presentations as input, the workshop then broke into five working groups to discuss research aspects of operating systems, distributed systems, computer architecture, networks, storage, and databases. The talks as well as the outcome of the breakout session and the concluding statements are summarized in this report.