[Nets-seminars] Talk by Anil Madhavapeddy (Cambridge), 7th Mar, 12 noon, Roberts 421

[Brad Karp]

Greetings, everyone.

It's my great pleasure to invite you to attend a talk by Anil
Madhavapeddy of the Systems Research Group at Cambridge. Anil is a
rising star networked computer systems researcher: he was instrumental
in the development of the now-ubiquitous Xen hypervisor, and is
currently pursuing an extremely interesting line of work on the design
of efficient, secure, and compact software for execution under a
hypervisor. In a sense, this work contemplates replacing the operating
system as we know it with something better.

All are strongly encouraged to attend! Talk announcement follows
below.

Best,
-Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

---

Speaker:

     Anil Madhavapeddy
     University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

Title:

     Unikernels: Functional Library Operating Systems for the Cloud


Time and place:

     12 noon, 7th March 2013, Roberts 421

Abstract:

We present unikernels, a new approach to deploying cloud services via
applications written in high-level source code. Unikernels are
single-purpose appliances that are compile-time specialised into
standalone microkernels, and sealed against modification when deployed
to a cloud platform. In return they offer significant reduction in
image sizes, improved efficiency and security, and reduced operational
costs.

Our "Mirage" prototype compiles OCaml code into unikernels that run on
commodity clouds and offer an order of magnitude reduction in code
size without significant performance penalty. The architecture
combines static type-safety with a single address-space layout that
can be made immutable via a hypervisor extension.

Our results demonstrate that:

- the hypervisor is a very efficient path to overcoming the hardware
  compatibility issues that have made past research operating systems
  impractical to deploy in the real-world.

- statically typed functional programming is a practical mechanism to
  construct safe, high-performance protocol stacks, and forms a usable
  compromise between strict formal verification pragmatic system
  construction.

I will conclude by discussing some of the uses that Mirage is being
put to, including: (i) the next-generation Xen toolstack that will be
deployed on millions of hosts worldwide; (ii) construction of
million-core computations for NASA; and (iii) secure embedded system
control for the Internet of Things.

Bio:

Dr Anil Madhavapeddy is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cambridge
Computer Laboratory, based in the Systems Research Group. He was on
the original team at Cambridge that developed the Xen hypervisor, and
subsequently served as the senior architect and product director for
XenSource/Citrix before returning to academia. Prior to obtaining his
PhD in 2006 from Cambridge, he had a diverse background in industry at
Network Appliance, NASA, and Internet Vision. He is an active member
of the open source development community with the OpenBSD operating
system, a member of the steering committee for Commercial Uses of
Functional Programming, and on the boards of startup companies such as
Ashima Arts.

He founded and directs the $4.5m OCaml Labs group at the Computer Lab,
which is an industrial-academic collaboration to promote functional
programming as a real solution for constructing mission-critical
systems.