The Israeli Systems Workshop 2024

ISW 2024

The Israeli Systems Workshop

In collaboration with ACM Systor 2024

September 25, 2024

The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo

Program

ISW

Keynote:

Research Advances in Scaling BFT Consensus

Dahlia Malkhi (UC Santa Barbara and Chainlink Labs)

Abstract: This talk gives a glimpse onto a decade of innovation which has been sparked by blockchains in scaling BFT Consensus. In a nutshell, a Consensus system allows a network of nodes to act in coordinated manner despite both benign outages and security (“Byzantine”) threats. For over four decades, experts in the field have been looking for Consensus solutions that can perform well in practice. In 2018, HotStuff transformed the landscape of practical BFT consensus solutions by introducing two key contributions, linearity and streamlining: HotStuff is the first BFT protocol that achieves linear communication complexity even when a fault occurs. Additionally, the HotStuff protocol is modular, consisting of a recurring broadcast module that can be pipelined, such that each broadcast extends the sequence of decisions by one. HotStuff was adopted by the famous Diem(Libra) project to drive global payment rails backed by a consortium-operated blockchain. In the end, Diem did not launch, but the technology behind it illuminated and fertilized the field.  The talk overviews solutions enabled by HotStuff to open problems which emerged under a variety of settings, underscoring insights from the blockchain arena that led to new approaches.

Bio: Dahlia Malkhi is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science of UCSB since 2024. She heads the Foundations of Financial Technology lab. Her research over two decades spans broad aspects of reliability and security of distributed systems, recently with focus on blockchains and advances in financial technology. Her work resulted in over 200 publications as well as a strong impact on computing technology.  Malkhi serves as Distinguished Scientist of Chainlink Labs  since 2022. From 2019 to 2022, she was the CTO at the Diem Association, and Lead Researcher at Novi Financial. In 2014, she co-founded VMware Research and became a Principal Researcher at VMware until 2019. Prior to that, Malkhi was a partner principal researcher at Microsoft Research, 2004-2014; an Associate Professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a senior researcher at AT&T Labs.

Abstract: This talk gives a glimpse onto a decade of innovation which has been sparked by blockchains in scaling BFT Consensus. In a nutshell, a Consensus system allows a network of nodes to act in coordinated manner despite both benign outages and security (“Byzantine”) threats. For over four decades, experts in the field have been looking for Consensus solutions that can perform well in practice. In 2018, HotStuff transformed the landscape of practical BFT consensus solutions by introducing two key contributions, linearity and streamlining: HotStuff is the first BFT protocol that achieves linear communication complexity even when a fault occurs. Additionally, the HotStuff protocol is modular, consisting of a recurring broadcast module that can be pipelined, such that each broadcast extends the sequence of decisions by one. HotStuff was adopted by the famous Diem(Libra) project to drive global payment rails backed by a consortium-operated blockchain. In the end, Diem did not launch, but the technology behind it illuminated and fertilized the field.  The talk overviews solutions enabled by HotStuff to open problems which emerged under a variety of settings, underscoring insights from the blockchain arena that led to new approaches.

Bio: Dahlia Malkhi is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science of UCSB since 2024. She heads the Foundations of Financial Technology lab. Her research over two decades spans broad aspects of reliability and security of distributed systems, recently with focus on blockchains and advances in financial technology. Her work resulted in over 200 publications as well as a strong impact on computing technology.  Malkhi serves as Distinguished Scientist of Chainlink Labs  since 2022. From 2019 to 2022, she was the CTO at the Diem Association, and Lead Researcher at Novi Financial. In 2014, she co-founded VMware Research and became a Principal Researcher at VMware until 2019. Prior to that, Malkhi was a partner principal researcher at Microsoft Research, 2004-2014; an Associate Professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a senior researcher at AT&T Labs.

Highlight Papers – Session A

Chair: Danny Harnik (IBM Research – Israel)

  • Physical vs. Logical Indexing with IDEA: Inverted Deduplication-Aware Index, FAST’24
    Asaf Levi (Technion); Philip Shilane (Dell Technologies); Sarai Sheinvald (Braude College of Engineering); Gala Yadgar (Technion)
  • In-Network Address Caching for Virtual Networks, SIGCOMM’24
    Lior Zeno (Technion); Ang Chen (University of Michigan); Mark Silberstein (Technion)
  • Deconstructing Alibaba Cloud’s Preemptible Instance Pricing, HPDC’23
    Danielle Movsowitz Davidow (University of Haifa, Tel Aviv University); Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda (CRI, University of Haifa); Orr Dunkelman (University of Haifa, TU Berlin)
  • Space-efficient FTL for Mobile Storage via Tiny Neural Nets, Systor24
    Ron Marcus, Alon Rashelbach, Pavel Lifshits, Ori Ben Zur, Mark Silberstein (Technion)

Panel – Interview:
AI-for-systems and Systems-for-AI

Moderator: Prof. Mark Silberstein, Technion

  • Matty Kadosh, NVIDIA Israel-1 ML supercomputer lead

Highlight Papers – Session B

Chair: Aviad Zuck (Technion)

  • Breaking Barriers: Scalable Data Platform Architectures for the Next Era of AI, Systor24 keynote (shortened)
    Shachar Fienblit (VAST Data)
  • A Practical Near Optimal Deployment of Service Function Chains in Edge-to-Cloud Networks, INFOCOM’24
    Rasoul Behravesh (Samsung R&D Institute, UK); David Breitgand, Dean H Lorenz (IBM Research – Israel); Danny Raz (Technion)
  • RecenTo: Finding Top-K Flows of the Recent Past, Proc. ACM on Networking’24
    Aviya Ozery, Jonathan Diamant, Shir Landau Feibish (The Open University of Israel)

Arriving and parking

The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo is located at the heart of Yaffo, at 10 He’ver Haleumim Street.

It’s just a few minutes walking distance from Bloomfield Stadion.

The new red line light train has two stations near the college. You may get off at “Erlich” or “Bloomfield” Stations.

If you arrive by car, a-free parking lot will be available inside the college, while many slots are also available around the building in public zones.

For registration for college parking, Please contact shefner@mta.ac.il (mention your full name, car number, phone number, and e-mail address, at least 48 hours prior to arrival).

Registration

Participation in the Israeli Systems Workshop and Systor is free, but registration is mandatory !

Please use this link or the following button to register to ISW – the Israeli Systems Workshop 2024 (September 25):

Please use this link or the following button to register to Systor 2024 (September 23-24, virtual conference):

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