Carlos Maltzahn Go to new website! This one won’t update!

New web site!

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 10:01:33 -0800

Please switch to my new website -- this website will not be updated from now on.

Why the switch? I’ve been using iWeb to maintain this website. Even though Apple discontinued iWeb since 2011, I was able to use it productively, and I always had a million more important things to do than porting my website. Now, Apple’s macOS Catalina doesn’t run 32-bit applications, including iWeb. I considered using a virtual machine to run Mojave -- but the primary reason why I upgrade macOS is increased security. Time to switch.

Luckily, just in time for the holiday season I found a really nice framework based on Hugo and the Academic theme. I love that it’s a static site generator because of it’s responsiveness, flexibility, and easy maintenance -- and it ‘s all open-source. No more dependency on a proprietary 32-bit application.

Paper accepted at NSDI ’20

Sat, 21 Dec 2019 12:09:13 -0800

Our paper (arxiv) led by Alexandru Uta at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam was accepted at NSDI ’20. The final version of the paper is due on 2/7/20.

Abstract: Performance variability has been acknowledged as a problem for over a decade by cloud practitioners and performance engineers. Yet, our survey of top systems conferences reveals that the research community regularly disregards variability when running experiments in the cloud. Focusing on networks, we assess the impact of variability on cloud-based big-data workloads by gathering traces from mainstream commercial clouds and private research clouds. Our data collection consists of millions of datapoints gathered while transferring over 9 petabytes of data. We characterize the network variability present in our data and show that, even though commercial cloud providers implement mechanisms for quality-of-service enforcement, variability still occurs, and is even exacerbated by such mechanisms and service provider policies. We show how big-data workloads suffer from significant slowdowns and lack predictability and replicability, even when state-of-the-art experimentation techniques are used. We provide guidelines for practitioners to reduce the volatility of big data performance, making experiments more repeatable.

15th GSoC Mentor Summit in Munich

Sat, 19 Oct 2019 01:19:24 -0700

In the second year of CROSS being a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code, we received Google funding for 4 summer students, Jayjeet Chakraborty (NIT Durgapur, West Bengal, India), Bárbara Galindo Dórame (Universidad de Sonora, Hermosillo, Mexico), Mohd Arshul Mansoori (Ambedkar Institute for Advanced Communication Technology & Research, Delhi, India), and Ashay Shirwadkar (UC Riverside).

The students were mentored by CROSS incubator fellows Ivo Jimenez and Jeff LeFevre as well as Michael Sevilla (TidalScale), Noah Watkins (vectorized.io), and Quincy Wofford (LANL). They did great work and we were able to invite two of the students to the CROSS Symposium this year and sponsored another one to visit SC19.

For more information, see my GSoC Mentor Summit lightening talk.

2019 CROSS Research Symposium

Wed, 2 Oct 2019 01:04:42 -0700

The 4th Annual CROSS Research Symposium is taking place today and tomorrow with three keynote speakers, Daniela Barbosa (VP World-wide Alliances, Linux Foundation Hyperledger), Joseph Jacks (Founder and CEO, OSS Capital), and Haoyuan Li (Founder, CTO and Chairman, Alluxio), 12 sessions on topics including Reproducibility in Systems Research, Open Science & Open Access, Aspects of Data Management, Programming AI for poets, Storage Systems, Eusocial Storage Devices, Hardware Security, Open Source Hardware Flows, and Data Management within the Storage System, and the 11th UC Santa Cruz Systems Oktoberfest.

Call for Participation for SSDBM 2019

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 23:31:48 -0700

The 31st International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM 2019) will be held in Santa Cruz, CA, USA on July 23-25, 2019. The event will take place on the beautiful UC Santa Cruz campus among redwoods and ocean views. The conference organizers put together a great program with keynotes by Magdalena Balazinska, Susan Davidson, and Alok Chaudhary, as well as evening events at the historic Cowell Hay Barn and the Seymour Marine Discovery Center.

Conference registration is open and the regular registration price is available until July 6. However, most hotel reservation blocks expire June 21.

Here is a 1-page flyer -- feel free to forward, print, or post.

Guest on Embedded.fm

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 14:20:03 -0700

One of the outcomes of attending !!Con West was an opportunity to join the 285th podcast of Embedded.fm: “A Chicken Getting to the Other Side” to talk about CROSS and its three incubator fellows, Kate Compton, Ivo Jimenez, and Jeff LeFevre. If you are wondering about the choice of title, listen to the podcast!

The podcast is created and hosted by Elecia White of “Making Embedded Systems” fame and Chris White who, in addition to being an embedded systems engineer, did all the editing of this podcast -- which made me sound so much better than in real life!

I’ve never been on a podcast before. Elecia and Chris did a fantastic job of preparing me for the episode and for making this a great experience throughout.

Data Storage Research Vision 2025

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 20:40:55 -0700

I was very honored to be part of last year’s Data Storage Research Vision 2025 NSF Workshop convened by George Amvrosiadis, Ali Butt, Vasily Tarasov, Erez Zadok, and Ming Zhao at IBM Almaden. The report is now available here.

Presentation at OSLS 2019

Sat, 16 Mar 2019 12:29:06 -0700

The Linux Foundation invited me to the Open Source Leadership Summit that this year, very conveniently, took place in Half Moon Bay.

I was selected to present on how to leverage research universities (pdf, prezi). Abstract: “Once Ph.D. students graduate, they tend to throw away what are often pretty amazing software infrastructures they built as part of their research project. One of the exceptions is Ceph because Sage Weil was able to build a community around what was 12 years ago just a research prototype. To enable more students to have a similar career as Sage, I founded the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) to offer students a career path to OSS leadership. Now sustained by six industry members, CROSS is funding three incubator and three research projects, and teaches an undergraduate course on how to submit Linux kernel patches.”

The event was amazing: it was great to see friends again, some of whom had a great influence on the design of CROSS, and to meet people with exciting new perspectives. All the keynotes are online and the slides of most of the presentations are as well. It all took place at the beautiful Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay, food and desert had plenty of gluten-free options, and, something I had never seen before, there was soy milk and oats milk next to the coffee!