Pramod Bhatotia, who completed his doctoral studies at MPI-SWS, has received the 2023 EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award.

The EuroSys Jochen Liedtke Young Researcher Award was created in 2014 by ACM EuroSys to reward junior European researchers who have demonstrated exceptional creativity and innovation in systems research, broadly construed. The award is given annually at the EuroSys conference, in memory of Jochen and his fundamental contributions to the systems community. The award is accompanied by a 2,000 EUR cash prize generously provided by RedHat.

Congratulations, Pramod!

Antoine Kaufmann has joined the tenure-track faculty at our institute, effective October 1, 2021.  He has been a member of our faculty as a research group leader since joining MPI-SWS in August 2018.  Antoine's research centers on the interplay of software and hardware in modern systems.  He is interested in the nascent challenges in designing, implementing, and maintaining hardware-software systems for different application domains, starting with data center networking and machine learning.

Prior to joining MPI-SWS, Antoine received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and his Master's and Bachelor's degrees from ETH Zurich.

Aastha Mehta, a doctoral student in the Distributed Systems group and the Security & Privacy group, has accepted a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Congratulations Aastha!

Aastha's research interests span systems security, data privacy, operating systems, and distributed systems. She has worked on building systems for ensuring policy compliance and for mitigating network side-channel leaks in online services. You can find out more about her work at https://people.mpi-sws.org/~aasthakm/.

The paper "ERIM: Secure, Efficient, In-process Isolation with Memory Protection Keys (MPK)" received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2019 Usenix Security Symposium. It was selected as one of 6 distinguished papers out of 113 papers that appeared in the conference proceedings.

The work was also selected as the recipient of the Usenix Internet Defense Prize, along with a USD 100k gift from Facebook to support  further development of the technology.

The paper was authored by MPI-SWS doctoral students Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Eslam Elnikety, and Michael Sammler, along with MPI-SWS intern Nuno Duarte and MPI-SWS faculty members Deepak Garg and Peter Druschel.

Read more about ERIM here.

Keon Jang has joined the institute as a tenure-track faculty member, effective February 1, 2019. Keon Jang is joining us from Google, where he has been a software engineer since 2016. He is broadly interested in network systems and currently his work focuses on network performance isolation in data-center networks.

Prior to Google, he worked on software support for on network function virtualization (NFV) at Intel Labs. He received his PhD in Computer Science from KAIST, and subsequently held a postdoctoral research position at Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK.

Consider the everyday websites and apps that we use: online shops, news websites, search engines, social networks, navigation apps, instant messaging apps, and many more.  Most of these programs don't just run in isolation on our laptops or phones, but instead connect over the internet to backends and databases running in datacenters across the world.  These backends perform a wide range of tasks, including constructing your personalized social network feed, storing and retrieving comments on message boards, and calculating results for your search query.  From our perspective as users, the actions we perform are simple, such as opening the app and loading our personalized profile.  But under the hood, each action usually results in complex processing across many processes and machines in a datacenter.

It has never been easier to write and deploy complex programs like these.  Cloud computing companies who own datacenters (such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) will gladly rent out computer services at a touch of a button, on demand.  Using designs like microservices, it is easy for programmers to construct complex programs out of smaller, simpler building blocks.  There are frameworks and open-source software packages to help developers construct big applications out of small pieces, to spread those pieces out over multiple machines in a datacenter, and to have the pieces communicate and interact with each other over the network.

Problems show up when software goes live.  Compared to developing and deploying the software, it is much harder to make sure everything goes smoothly when the software is up and running.  Distributed computer programs have lots of moving pieces, and there are lots of opportunities for things to go wrong.  For example, if one machine in the datacenter has a hardware problem, or the code is buggy, or too many people are trying to access it at once, the effects can be wide-ranging.  It can create a butterfly effect of problems, which we term cascading failures, that can lead to the app or website as a whole becoming slow, or going down entirely.  It's hard for programmers to get to the bottom of these kinds of problems, because there's no single machine or process doing all the work.  A problem that occurs on one machine might manifest as strange symptoms on a different machine later on.  Figuring out the root cause of a problem is challenging, as is anticipating problems in the first place.  Even big internet companies like Facebook and Google experience problems like this today.

These kinds of problems motivate the research of the Cloud Software Systems Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.  We research ways for operators to understand what's going on in their live distributed system, to troubleshoot problems when they occur at runtime, and to design systems that proactively avoid problems.  One approach we take is to design distributed tracing tools that can be used by the system operators.  The goal of distributed tracing is to record information about what a program does while it's running.  The tools record events, metrics, and performance counters, which together expose the current state and performance of the system, and how it changes over time.  A key additional step taken by distributed tracing tools is to record the causal ordering of events happening in the system — that is, the interactions and dependencies between machines and processes.  Causal ordering is is very useful for diagnosing problems that span multiple processes and machines, especially when there might be lots of concurrent, unrelated activity going on at the same time.  It lets us reconstruct the end-to-end execution paths of requests, across all components and machines, and then reason about the sequence of conditions and events that led up to a problem.  Without causal ordering, this information is missing, and pinpointing the root cause of a problem would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

The Cloud Software Systems Research Group has looked at a number of challenges in making distributed tracing tools efficient, scalable, and more widely deployable. In our recent work, we have thought about how you can efficiently insert instrumentation to record entirely new information, into an already-running system, without having to rebuild or restart the system [1].  We have looked at problems in dealing with the large volume of data generated by distributed tracing tools, and deciding which data is most valuable to keep if there's not enough room to keep it all [2].  We have also considered the implications of distributed tracing at extremely large scale, and how to efficiently collect, aggregate, and process tracing data in real-time [3].

In our ongoing work, we are investigating ways for the data recorded by tracing tools to feed back in to decisions made by datacenter infrastructure, such as resource management, scheduling, and load balancing.  We are also considering new challenges that arise in scalable data analysis: how do you analyze large datasets of traces and derive insights about aggregate system behavior?  One approach we are exploring uses techniques in representational machine learning, to transform richly annotated tracing data into a more tractable form for interactive analysis.  More broadly, our group investigates a variety of approaches besides just distributed tracing tools, including ways to better design and develop the distributed systems in the first place.  Ultimately, our goal is to make modern cloud systems easier to operate, understand, and diagnose.

References

[1] Jonathan Mace, Ryan Roelke, and Rodrigo Fonseca.  Pivot Tracing: Dynamic Causal Monitoring for Distributed Systems.  In Proceedings of the 25th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '15), 2015.

[2] Pedro Las-Casas, Jonathan Mace, Dorgival Guedes, and Rodrigo Fonseca.  Weighted Sampling of Execution Traces: Capturing More Needles and Less Hay.  In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC'18), 2018.

[3] Jonathan Kaldor, Jonathan Mace, Michał Bejda, Edison Gao, Wiktor Kuropatwa, Joe O'Neill, Kian Win Ong, Bill Schaller, Pingjia Shan, Brendan Viscomi, Vinod Venkataraman, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Yee Jiun Song.  Canopy: An End-to-End Performance Tracing And Analysis System. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '17), 2017.

MPI-SWS faculty member Jonathan Mace has received an honorable mention for the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Launched in 2013, the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (ACM SIGOPS) to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied. Only one winner is chosen annually, and this year, Jonathan Mace's dissertation received an Honorable Mention for the award.

"Many tools for monitoring and enforcing distributed systems," Jonathan explains, "capture information about end-to-end executions by propagating in-band contexts." In his thesis---A Universal Architecture for Cross-Cutting Tools in Distributed Systems---he characterizes a broad class of such cross-cutting tools and extends these ideas to new applications in resource management and dynamic monitoring. Finally, he identifies underlying commonalities in this class of tools, and proposes an abstraction layering that simplifies their development, deployment, and reuse.

Jonathan Mace has joined the institute as a tenure-track faculty member, effective September 1, 2018.  He is joining us from Brown University, USA, where he has completed his Ph.D. in computer science.  Jonathan's research focuses on tools, techniques, and abstractions to make it easier to develop and operate cloud distributed systems.  In particular, he is interested in making it easier to reason about and control complicated, end-to-end system behaviors at runtime.

Before starting his Ph.D., Jonathan worked for two years at IBM UK, and earned his undergraduate degree from Oxford University.  He is a recipient of the Facebook Fellowship in Distributed Systems, an SOSP Best Paper Award, and the Honorable Mention for the Dennis Ritchie Thesis Award.

Antoine Kaufmann is joining us from the University of Washington in Seattle,
where he obtained his Ph.D. in computer science. His research investigates the
design and implementation of efficient, scalable, and robust systems for
rapidly evolving modern platforms, with a current focus on data centers. He
addresses these challenges from a systems perspective, with solutions that span
multiple layers of the systems stack, from operating systems through networks
down to hardware, but also programming languages and applications.

Antoine joins the institute as a research group leader, effective Aug 6, 2018. Before
his Ph.D., Antoine obtained his Master's and Bachelor's degree from ETH Zurich.

Applications are invited for faculty positions at all career stages in computer science, with a particular emphasis on systems (broadly construed). We expect multiple positions to be filled in systems, but exceptional candidates in other areas of computer science are also strongly encouraged to apply.

A doctoral degree in computer science or related areas and an outstanding research record (commensurate for the applicant's career stage) are required. Successful candidates are expected to build a team and pursue a highly visible research agenda, both independently and in collaboration with other groups.

MPI-SWS is part of a network of over 80 Max Planck Institutes, Germany's premier basic-research organisations. MPIs have an established record of world-class, foundational research in the sciences, technology, and the humanities. The institute offers a unique environment that combines the best aspects of a university department and a research laboratory: Faculty enjoy full academic freedom, lead a team of doctoral students and post-docs, and have the opportunity to teach university courses; at the same time, they enjoy ongoing institutional funding in addition to third-party funds, a technical infrastructure unrivaled for an academic institution, as well as internationally competitive compensation.

The institute is located in the German cities of Saarbruecken and Kaiserslautern, in the tri-border area of Germany, France, and Luxembourg. We maintain an international and diverse work environment and seek applications from outstanding researchers worldwide. The working language is English; knowledge of the German language is not required for a successful career at the institute.

Qualified candidates should apply on our application website (apply.mpi-sws.org). To receive full consideration, applications should be received by December 1st, 2017.

The institute is committed to increasing the representation of minorities, women, and individuals with physical disabilities. We particularly encourage such individuals to apply. The initial tenure-track appointment is for five years; it can be extended to seven years based on a midterm evaluation in the fourth year. A permanent contract can be awarded upon a successful tenure evaluation in the sixth year.

MPI-SWS researchers—faculty members Krishna Gummadi and Peter Druschel and former SWS doctoral students Alan Mislove and Massimiliano Marcon—have received the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award for their IMC 2007 paper on "Measurement and Analysis of Online Social Networks." The work was done in collaboration with Bobby Bhattacharjee of the University of Maryland.

The award citation reads as follows: "This is one of the first papers that examine multiple online social networks at scale. By introducing novel measurement techniques, the paper has had an enduring influence on the analysis, modeling and design of modern social media and social networking services."

MPI-SWS Ph.D. student Aastha Mehta was selected to attend the 4th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum in September 2016. An international committee of experts selected Aastha for one of only 200 spots reserved for young computer scientists and mathematicians from around the world. In addition to participating in the forum, she was one of 6 researchers invited for a blog interview. Aastha was provided funding to attend the forum through a Romberg Grant.

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum gives young computer science and math researchers the opportunity to interact with some of the world's top scientists. The twenty speakers for the 2016 Forum, for example, include 12 different Turing Award winners, as well as numerous winners of the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize.

MPI-SWS spinoff Aircloak has won the 2014 Cisco Internet of Things (IoT) Security Grand Challenge. Aircloak was selected for its innovative approach to privacy protection—it is building the world's first anonymized analytics system. As a grand challenge award winner, Aircloak was awarded a $75,000 cash prize and was showcased at the IoT World Forum. In addition, the award also provides the Aircloak team with mentoring, training and access to business expertise from Cisco and other supporting organizations, as well as potential investment and partnering opportunities in the future. For more info see the Cisco award announcement (in English or in German), and the Cisco blog.

Lorenzo Alvisi, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award provides support for him to spend up to a year at the institute, where he will work with Peter Druschel and other MPI-SWS researchers on fault-tolerant computing for multi-core servers.

This is the second year that an MPI-SWS visiting professor has received a Humboldt Award. Johannes Gehrke was a 2010 Humboldt Research Award recipient.

The Humboldt Research Award is granted "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future."

We are pleased to announce that two new faculty will join MPI-SWS.



Allen Clement obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. Allen's research aims at designing and building systems that continue to work despite the myriad of things that go 'wrong' in deployed systems, including broken components, malicious adversaries, and benign race conditions. His research builds on techniques from distributed systems, security, fault tolerance, and game theory.



Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil is joining us from Cornell University, where he obtained his PhD in computer science. Cristian's research aims at developing computational frameworks that can lead to a better understanding of human social behavior, by unlocking the unprecedented potential of the large amounts of natural language data generated online. His work tackles problems related to conversational behavior, opinion mining, computational semantics and computational advertising.

MPI-SWS faculty member Paul Francis has received the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award for 2011.

The ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award recognizes papers published 10 to 12 years in the past in Computer Communication Review or any SIGCOMM sponsored or co-sponsored conference that is deemed to be an outstanding paper whose contents are still a vibrant and useful contribution today.

Paul's 2001 paper, "A Scalable Content-Addressable Network," was coauthored with Mark Handley, Richard Karp, Sylvia Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker. This paper is one of four highly influential papers that laid the foundation for P2P systems based on distributed hash tables (DHTs).

Two MPI-SWS alumni — Andreas Haeberlen and Alan Mislove — have received NSF CAREER awards. The CAREER award is the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.

Andreas Haeberlen, now an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has received the award for his proposal "Evidence in Federated Distributed Systems."

Alan Mislove, now an Assistant Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University, has received the award for his proposal "Systems for the Emerging Patterns of Content Exchange."

Johannes Gehrke, a professor at Cornell University, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award will provide support for him to spend eight months in Germany, working with Peter Druschel and other MPI-SWS researchers on data-intensive distributed systems that make up the software infrastructure inside such large Web companies as Amazon, Yahoo! and Google.

The Humboldt Research Award is granted "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future."

Andreas Haeberlen has been awarded the 2009 Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding scientific achievement. The medal, and its accompanying monetary prize, will be presented to Andreas at the Max Planck society's annual General Assembly in Hannover on June 16. Andreas's medal was awarded for "pioneering work on accountability in distributed computer systems, in particular for the design, implementation and demonstration of practical techniques for the reliable and tamper-proof detection of complex faults. Andreas obtained his PhD in Spring 2009 and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Founded in 1948, the Max Planck Society is a non-profit scientific organization affiliated with the Max Planck Institutes. The Society awards the Otto Hahn Medal annually to young scientists in recognition of outstanding scientific achievement. In addition to a stipend, the award gives winners preference for grants enabling them to conduct research abroad for one year.

MPI-SWS faculty Peter Druschel has been honored as the eighth recipient of the Mark Weiser Award -- the top international award in the field of operating systems.

The Mark Weiser Award was established in 2001 by ACM's Special Interest Group on Operating Systems. Recipients must have begun their careers no earlier than 20 years prior to nomination, and they are selected based upon "contributions that are highly creative, innovative, and possibly high-risk, in keeping with the visionary spirit of Mark Weiser."

In the award ceremony, Peter's broad and high-impact contributions in his research field were highlighted, including work such as the Pastry peer-to-peer system, the Flash web server, the Fbufs operating system support for high-speed networking, and his work on resource management in large-scale servers.

Peter received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1994. He was a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, before accepting his current position as the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

Previous recipients of the Mark Weiser Award are Frans Kaashoek (MIT), Mendel Rosenblum (Stanford), Mike Burrows (Google), Brian Bershad (Univ. of Washington), Tom Anderson (Univ. of Washington), Dawson Engler (Stanford), and Peter Chen (Univ. of Michigan)

Krishna Gummadi, Ph.D., accepts a position on the faculty of the MPI for Software Systems as an independent researcher. This position is comparable to a tenure-track Assitant Professor position at a U.S. University.

Krishna hold a B.Tech. degree from IIT Madras, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle, all in Computer Science and Engineering. Krishna has gained international recognition for his research on networked systems, as the recipient of three best paper awards at leading conferences in his area and as the main author of the most cited computer science articles in 2003 and 2004, respectively, according to citeseer. He will join the MPI for Software Systems in October 2005.

Prof. Peter Druschel, Ph.D., accepts the position of Founding Director of the MPI for Software Systems. Peter comes from Rice University in Houston, TX, where he has spent eleven years as Assistant Professor (1994-2000), Associate Professor (2000-2002) and Full Professor (2002-) of Computer Science. Peter also spent time teaching and researching at the University of Paris VI, at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and at the Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. (FH) degree in Electrical Engineering from Fachhochschule Munich, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Arizona. Peter conducts research in experimental distributed systems, with a focus on self-organizing, decentralized and autonomous systems. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

In the spring of 2009, MPI-SWS graduated its first four PhD students—Andreas Haeberlen, Alan Mislove, Animesh Nandi, and Atul Singh. All four students have landed competitive academic or research positions in a very tight job market.

This fall, Andreas Haeberlen will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Alan Mislove will be an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, Animesh Nandi will be a researcher at Bell Labs, India, and Atul Singh will be a researcher at NEC Labs, Princeton. The students received their PhD degrees from Rice University after spending the last several years of their graduate studies at MPI-SWS.

Paul Francis joins the institute's faculty as a scientific director. Paul's work over the years has focused on network routing and addressing problems, with a particular interest in large and self-configuring systems.

Paul's work has had tremendous impact on both research and industrial practice. He is best known for inventing Network Address Translation (NAT), shared multicast trees (which form the basis of PIM-SM), and the use of multiple addresses to scale routing in the face of site multihoming, which was adopted by IPv6.

Paul joins MPI-SWS from Cornell University, where he was on the faculty of the computer science department. Prior to that, Paul spent many years in industry labs such as Bellcore, NTT Research Labs in Tokyo, ACIRI in Berkeley, and at several Silicon Valley startups.

Paul Francis's arrival marks the opening of the insitute's Kaiserslautern site.

We are pleased to announce that three new faculty will join MPI-SWS.

Rodrigo Rodrigues will lead a research group on Dependable Systems. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joins us from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon.

Derek Dreyer will lead a research group on Type Systems and Functional Programming. He obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and joins us from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Andrey Rybalchenko will lead a research group on Verification Systems. He previously held a post-doctoral position with Tom Henzinger at EPFL. He is the winner of the Otto-Hahn-Medal of the Max Planck Society.