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1. TMC: Pay-as-you-Go Distributed Communication

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3343180.3343194  

   Demoulin, Henri Maxime; Vasilakis, Nikos; Sonchack, John; Pedisich, Isaac; Liu, Vincent; Loo, Boon Thau; Phan, Linh Thi; Smith, Jonathan M.; Zhang, Irene (August 2019, Proceedings of the 3rd Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking 2019)

   We revisit the gap between what distributed systems need from the transport layer and what protocols in wide deployment provide. Such a gap complicates the implementation of distributed systems and impacts their performance. We introduce Tunable Multicast Communication (TMC), an abstraction that allows developers to easily specialize communication channels in distributed systems. TMC is presented as a deployable and extensible user-space library that exposes high-level tunable guarantees. TMC has the potential of improving the performance of distributed applications with minimal-to-zero development and deployment effort. 

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2. Reflections on trusting distributed trust

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3563766.3564089  

   Dauterman, Emma; Fang, Vivian; Crooks, Natacha; Popa, Raluca Ada (November 2022, HotNets '22: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks)

   Many systems today distribute trust across multiple parties such that the system provides certain security properties if a subset of the parties are honest. In the past few years, we have seen an explosion of academic and industrial cryptographic systems built on distributed trust, including secure multi-party computation applications (e.g., private analytics, secure learning, and private key recovery) and blockchains. These systems have great potential for improving security and privacy, but face a significant hurdle on the path to deployment. We initiate study of the following problem: a single organization is, by definition, a single party, and so how can a single organization build a distributed-trust system where corruptions are independent? We instead consider an alternative formulation of the problem: rather than ensuring that a distributed-trust system is set up correctly by design, what if instead, users can audit a distributed-trust deployment? We propose a framework that enables a developer to efficiently and cheaply set up any distributed-trust system in a publicly auditable way. To do this, we identify two application-independent building blocks that we can use to bootstrap arbitrary distributed-trust applications: secure hardware and an append-only log. We show how to leverage existing implementations of these building blocks to deploy distributed-trust systems, and we give recommendations for infrastructure changes that would make it easier to deploy distributed-trust systems in the future. 

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3. Opportunities for Cross-Layer Design in High-Performance Computing Systems with Integrated Silicon Photonic Networks

   https://doi.org/978-3-9819263-4-7  

   Mirza, A.; Avari, S.; Taheri, E.; Pasricha, S.; Nikdast, M. (March 2020, IEEE/ACM Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference and Exhibition)

   With the ever growing complexity of high performance computing (HPC) systems to satisfy emerging application requirements (e.g., high memory bandwidth requirement for machine learning applications), the performance bottleneck in such systems has moved from being computation-centric to be more communication-centric. Silicon photonic interconnection networks have been proposed to address the aggressive communication requirements in HPC systems, to realize higher bandwidth, lower latency, and better energy efficiency. There have been many successful efforts on developing silicon photonic devices, integrated circuits, and architectures for HPC systems. Moreover, many efforts have been made to address and mitigate the impact of different challenges (e.g., fabrication process and thermal variations) in silicon photonic interconnects. However, most of these efforts have focused only on a single design layer in the system design space (e.g., device, circuit or architecture level). Therefore, there is often a gap between what a design technique can improve in one layer, and what it might impair in another one. In this paper, we discuss the promise of cross-layer design methodologies for HPC systems integrating silicon photonic interconnects. In particular, we discuss how such cross-layer design solutions based on cooperatively designing and exchanging design objectives among different system design layers can help achieve the best possible performance when integrating silicon photonics into HPC systems 

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4. Towards a NoOps Model for WLCG

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202024507024  

   Gardner, Robert; Bryant, Lincoln; Stephen, Judith; Vukotic, Ilija; Weaver, Christopher; Wu, Wenjing (November 2020, 24th International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2019))

   null (Ed.)

   One of the most costly factors in providing a global computing infrastructure such as the WLCG is the human effort in deployment, integration, and operation of the distributed services supporting collaborative computing, data sharing and delivery, and analysis of extreme scale datasets. Furthermore, the time required to roll out global software updates, introduce new service components, or prototype novel systems requiring coordinated deployments across multiple facilities is often increased by communication latencies, staff availability, and in many cases expertise required for operations of bespoke services. While the WLCG (and distributed systems implemented throughout HEP) is a global service platform, it lacks the capability and flexibility of a modern platform-as-a-service including continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) methods, development-operations capabilities (DevOps, where developers assume a more direct role in the actual production infrastructure), and automation. Most importantly, tooling which reduces required training, bespoke service expertise, and the operational effort throughout the infrastructure, most notably at the resource endpoints (sites), is entirely absent in the current model. In this paper, we explore ideas and questions around potential NoOps models in this context: what is realistic given organizational policies and constraints? How should operational responsibility be organized across teams and facilities? What are the technical gaps? What are the social and cybersecurity challenges? Conversely what advantages does a NoOps model deliver for innovation and for accelerating the pace of delivery of new services needed for the HL-LHC era? We will describe initial work along these lines in the context of providing a data delivery network supporting IRIS-HEP DOMA R&D. 

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5. A Case Study of API Design for Interoperability and Security of the Internet of Things

   Kim, Dongha; Lee, Chanhee; Kim, Hokeun (November 2024, EAI)

   Heterogeneous distributed systems, including the Internet of Things (IoT) or distributed cyber-physical systems (CPS), often su↵er a lack of interoperability and security, which hinders the wider deployment of such systems. Specifically, the di↵erent levels of security requirements and the heterogeneity in terms of communication models, for instance, point-to-point vs. publish-subscribe, are the example challenges of IoT and distributed CPS consisting of heterogeneous devices and applications. In this paper, we propose a working application programming interface (API) and runtime to enhance interoperability and security while addressing the challenges that stem from the heterogeneity in the IoT and distributed CPS. In our case study, we design and implement our application programming interface (API) design approach using opensource software, and with our working implementation, we evaluate the e↵ectiveness of our proposed approach. Our experimental results suggest that our approach can achieve both interoperability and security in the IoT and distributed CPS with a reasonably small overhead and better-managed software. 

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