Seventh Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, April 25 – April 27, 2023

Call for Presentations & Participation

We invite you to submit 500 word / 0.5 page abstracts (PDF or plain text) of work for presentation at the next UK Systems Research Challenges workshop. In most cases the main points to include in the abstract are the problem being solved, the new idea or hypothesis being explored in your work, and the current state of the project (e.g., whether you are looking for feedback on an early idea or presenting finished results that others might want to use).

This is the seventh iteration of a workshop bringing together systems researchers from across the UK and beyond, to discuss pressing topics affecting the design and implementation of large-scale systems in a friendly and inclusive setting. We’re interested in presentations that speak to:

innovative mechanisms
lessons learned: experience with large or unusual systems
a viewpoint on a controversial systems topic
a big problem coming over the horizon
and really, anything that would be of interest to the builders of computer systems

Past topics have included everything from system security and architecture, to consensus and engineering, to data visualisation, data centres and the Internet of Things. We aim to be broad and inclusive– if it’s a matter that has bearing on how we design, build, operate and use large-scale computing systems, it’s in scope.

This is an informal workshop without published proceedings. Work is not subject to detailed peer review; we are requesting abstracts only to help us put together the programme and confirm that work is on-topic. In the event of an excess of submissions, preference for presentation slots will be given to Ph.D. students and early career researchers.

Location

Ramside Hall, Ramside Hall, Carrville, Durham DH1 1TD
Coach transport will be provided between the venue and Newcastle city centre (Urban Sciences Building, 1 Science Square, Science Central, NE4 5TG)

Key Dates

~~Abstract submission deadline: 27 March 2023~~
~~Acceptance notification and presentation programme: 10 April 2023~~
Workshop dates: arrival evening 25 April, closing with lunch 27 April

Programme

Tuesday 25th April

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 Ramside Hall.

19:00 Drinks reception

19:30 Dinner in the Beaumont Suite

Wednesday 26th April

The conference will be held in the Neville & Hatfield Suite.

09:00 Welcome & Intro by Tom Spink

09:10–10:30 Session 1: Architecture (chaired by Tom Spink)

“A Hypervisor Architecture for Efficient GPU Sharing between Multiple VMs”, Karim Manaouil (University of Edinburgh)
“Maximize the IO performance of overcommitted VM”, Tong Xing (University of Edinburgh)
“Generating Fast Functional Instruction Set Simulators from Formal Specifications”, Ferdia McKeogh (University of St Andrews)
“Scalable and Fault-Tolerant Data Stream Processing on Multi-Core Architectures”, Georgios Theodorakis (Neo4j)

10:30–11:00 Coffee

11:00–12:00 Session 2: Short Talks *(chaired by Adam Barker)

“Resilience-aware time predictable and resource-efficient scheduling for autonomous systems”, Jie Zou (University of York)
“What Have Dynamic Languages Ever Done For Us?”, James Clarkson (Neo4j)
“Secure Work Groups for POSIX”, Indraj Gandham (University of York)
“The Energy Consumption of the “Fediverse””, Anna Mitchell (University of St Andrews)

12:00–13:00 Lunch

13:30–15:10 Session 3: Distributed Systems and the Cloud (chaired by Saleem Bhatti)

“Epoch-based Commit Protocols in Distributed OLTP Databases”, Jack Waudby (Neo4j)
“Pushing the Limits of Near-Data Processing with Funclets”, Alan Nair (University of Edinburgh)
“Moving a scientific computing system to the cloud”, Simon Dobson (University of St Andrews)
“Enhancing Memory Performance in Cloud-based Applications through Cross-invocation Information”, Esra Nur Ayaz (University of Edinburgh)
“Consensus is simpler and faster when you ConSpire”, Chris Jensen (University of Cambridge)

15:10–15:30 Coffee

15:30–17:00 Session 4: Network and Serverless (chaired by Poonam Yadav)

“Not so slow TCP (re)start”, Mihail Yanev (University of Glasgow)
“The Privacy Hazards of Abstraction in the Network Stack”, Gregor Haywood (University of St Andrews)
“End-to-end Serverless-Native Data Analytics”, Shengda Zhu and Shyam Jesalpura (equal co-authors, University of Edinburgh)
“Load shaving of microservices using serverless”, Dilina Dehigama (University of Edinburgh)

19:00–21:00 Dinner

21:00–22:00 Lightning Talks

Short (5 minute) talks on any relevant topic.

Thursday 27th April

Note the later start today

10:00–10:10 Good morning!

10:10–10:50 Session 5: Short Talks

“On Timeseries Downsampling in Stream Processing Engines”, Iain Dixon (Newcastle University)
“Using DAFNI for a large-scale flood simulation demonstrator project”, Robin Wardle (Newcastle University)
“RAISE: Responsible AI Systems Engineering”, Alexandros Koliousis (Northeastern University London)

10:50–11:10 Coffee

11:10–12:30 Session 6: Systems for Machine Learning, and Programming Languages (chaired by Paul Ezhilchelvan)

“Rethinking Federated Learning Systems”, Di Wu (University of St Andrews)
“DNNShifter: Compressing large neural networks for edge systems”, Bailey Eccles (University of St Andrews)
“PipeLearn: Pipeline Parallelism for Collaborative Machine Learning Systems”, Zihan Zhang (University of St Andrews)
“Collection Skeletons: Declarative Abstractions for Data Collections”, Zhibo Li (University of Edinburgh)

12:30–12:45 Wrap-up

12:45–14:00 Lunch

Registration and Costs

Including accommodation and meals:

Current students: £60
Standard: £125

We are committed to widen participation and historically underrepresented groups within the Systems community. We recognise the need for individualised support to address barriers to participation. To discuss how we can support you (e.g. through bursaries or reimbursement of reasonable expenses) please contact Jennifer Wood.

Organising Committee

Chair

Tom Spink, tcs6@st-andrews.ac.uk, University of St Andrews

Co-Chairs

Richard Mortier, richard.mortier@cl.cam.ac.uk, Cambridge University
Derek McAuley, derek.mcauley@nottingham.ac.uk, Nottingham University
Paul Watson, paul.watson@newcastle.ac.uk, Newcastle University
Adam Barker, adam.barker@st-andrews.ac.uk, University of St Andrews

For any other questions or queries, please contact Tom Spink.