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2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
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Technical Sessions: Wednesday, April 13 | Thursday, April 14 | Friday, April 15 | All in one file
FREENIX Track | Invited Talks Track | Guru is in Sessions

Wednesday, April 13, 2005
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Wednesday
Opening Remarks, Awards, Keynote
Salon E/F
George Dyson Keynote Address
Von Neumann's Universe
Digital Computing at the Institute for Advanced Study, 1945-1958

George Dyson, historian and author of Darwin Among the Machines

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The digital universe consists of two kinds of bits: differences in space and differences in time. Digital computers translate between these two forms of information—structure and sequence—according to definite rules. Exactly 60 years ago, John von Neumann and a small group of nonconformists launched a project to do this at electronic speed. The resulting architecture and coding has descended directly to almost all computers now in use.

Von Neumann succeeded in jump-starting the computer revolution by bringing engineers into the den of the mathematicians, rather than by bringing mathematicians into a den of engineers. The stored-program computer, as delivered by von Neumann, broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Our universe would never be the same.

With a bare 5 kilobytes of high-speed storage, von Neumann and his colleagues tackled previously intractable problems ranging from thermonuclear explosions, stellar evolution, and long-range weather forecasting to cellular automata, genetic coding, and the origins of life. Programs were small enough to be completely debugged, but hardware could not be counted on to perform consistently from one kilocycle to the next. Although this situation is now reversed, many of the lessons learned on the von Neumann project remain directly applicable today.



George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests have ranged from the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka, 1986) to the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines, 1997) and nuclear bomb-propelled space exploration (Project Orion, 2002). Dyson, who lives in Bellingham, Washington, divides his time between building boats and writing books. He is currently compiling an account of the confluence of people, technology, and ideas surrounding John von Neumann's Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study, 1945–1958.
10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break  
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Wednesday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Debugging
Session Chair: Mema Roussopoulos, Harvard University

Awarded General Track Best Paper Award!
Debugging Operating Systems with Time-Traveling Virtual Machines

Samuel T. King, George W. Dunlap, and Peter M. Chen, University of Michigan

Using Valgrind to Detect Undefined Value Errors with Bit-Precision
Julian Seward, OpenWorks LLP; Nicholas Nethercote, University of Texas at Austin

Pulse: A Dynamic Deadlock Detection Mechanism Using Speculative Execution
Tong Li, Carla S. Ellis, Alvin R. Lebeck, and Daniel J. Sorin, Duke University

INVITED TALKS
Salon F

Computer Simulations of Thermal Convection and Magnetic Field Generation in Stars and Planets
Gary Glatzmaier, University of California, Santa Cruz

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Global 3D computer models have produced numerical simulations of convection and magnetic field generation in the liquid interiors of terrestrial planets like the Earth and giant planets, like Jupiter. The structure and time-dependence of the large-scale magnetic fields outside the core in Earth simulations resemble the Earth's field to first order and the surface zonal wind profiles in giant planet simulations are beginning to resemble Jupiter's banded zonal wind profile. Examples of such 3D simulations will be presented together with much higher-resolution 2D turbulent simulations, which suggest we are still far from having a robust understanding of the internal dynamics of planets.

FREENIX TRACK
Salon G/H/J/K

Software Tools
Session Chair: Greg Watson, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Build Buddy for Fun and Profit
Dan Mills, Novell, Inc.

Scmbug: Policy-based Integration of Software Configuration Management with Bug-tracking
Kristis Makris, Arizona State University; Kyung Dong Ryu, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Linux Physical Memory Analysis
Paul Movall, Ward Nelson, and Shaun Wetzstein, IBM

GURU SESSIONS
Los Angeles/La Jolla

Configuration
Mark Burgess, Oslo University College; Alva Couch, Tufts University

Mark Burgess is a professor at Oslo University College and is the author of cfengine. He has been researching the principles of network and system administration for over ten years and is the author of Principles of Network and System Administration (John Wiley & Sons). He is currently working on the next phase of cfengine development.

Alva Couch is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University. He has been a cfengine user since 1998 and has written several papers studying its properties. He is currently working on a practice manual incorporating a fusion of best tips and tricks, backed by careful theoretical analysis of the effects of practice.

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Wednesday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Planning & Management
Session Chair: Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin

Surviving Internet Catastrophes
Flavio Junqueira, Ranjita Bhagwan, Alejandro Hevia, Keith Marzullo, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, University of California, San Diego

Making Scheduling "Cool": Temperature-Aware Workload Placement in Data Centers
Justin Moore and Jeff Chase, Duke University; Parthasarathy Ranganathan and Ratnesh Sharma, Hewlett-Packard Labs

CHAMELEON: A Self-Evolving, Fully-Adaptive Resource Arbitrator for Storage Systems
Sandeep Uttamchandani, IBM Almaden Research Center; Li Yin, University of California, Berkeley; Guillermo A. Alvarez and John Palmer, IBM Almaden Research Center; Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

INVITED TALKS
Salon F

DDoS Defense in Practice and Theory
Eddie Kohler, University of California, Los Angeles, and Mazu Networks

View presentation slides (PDF)

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Depending on whom you ask, distributed denial of service attacks are either a nuisance, or avoidable today using commercial tools, or so fundamental as to require rearchitecting the Internet. So how serious is the problem, and what can we do? This talk will attempt to answer these questions with a tour of the current DDoS landscape, including commercial and research-grade solutions and experiences from the trenches.

FREENIX TRACK
Salon G/H/J/K

Emulation
Session Chair: Stephen Tweedie, Red Hat

Running Virtualized Native Drivers in User Mode Linux
V. Guffens and G. Bastin, Université Catholique de Louvain

QEMU, a Fast and Portable Dynamic Translator
Fabrice Bellard

Awarded FREENIX Track Best Paper Award!
USB/IP—A Peripheral Bus Extension for Device Sharing over IP Network

Takahiro Hirofuchi, Eiji Kawai, Kazutoshi Fujikawa, and Hideki Sunahara, Nara Institute of Science and Technology

GURU SESSIONS
Los Angeles/La Jolla

Clustering and Grid Computing
Greg Bruno, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Greg Bruno is a core developer for Rocks, a high-performance Linux cluster distribution developed at San Diego Supercomputer Center. From Aichi, Japan to Zurich, Switzerland, non-cluster experts have used Rocks to easily deploy their own computational resource. Participants in Greg's Guru session will learn how they can too.

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. Wednesday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Improving Filesystems
Session Chair: Mustafa Uysal, Hewlett-Packard Labs

A Transactional Flash File System for Microcontrollers
Eran Gal and Sivan Toledo, Tel-Aviv University

Analysis and Evolution of Journaling File Systems
Vijayan Prabhakaran, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Comparison-Based File Server Verification
Yuen-Lin Tan, Terrence Wong, John D. Strunk, Gregory R. Ganger, Carnegie Mellon University

INVITED TALKS
Salon F

Massively Multi-player Games and the Systems That Love Them
Mark Wirt, Butterfly.net

View presentation slides (PDF)

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Massively multi-player games (MMOs) are persistent-state worlds with thousands to hundreds of thousands of participants. Predictions about the growth of the market vary, but the trend is unambiguous: these games are becoming an increasingly important form of experience and entertainment, and players are flocking to them world-wide.

From their natal inception (so-called "Multi-user Dungeons" running on time-shared computers) to today, MMOs have always presented interesting challenges to programmers, computer scientists, and systems administrators. To service today's player, fully-distributed systems of hundreds of computers must be constructed to manage these games and provide low-latency, complex environments for thousands of simultaneous players. And unlike stateless protocols (such at HTTP), the state of the player, game, and connection must be meticulously maintained. Deploy such a system in an environment where thousands of bright users are actively trying to cheat and/or break the system, and one is immediately presented with a challenging set of problems.

This talk will discuss the challenges of writing and deploying MMOs, some of which are relatively unique to the domain. Some of these challenges include the creation of on-line, functional economies and societies; deploying distributed transactional systems; creating highly synchronized state distribution systems; security; and the management of these systems (including software deployment, version management, updates, etc.)

FREENIX TRACK
Salon G/H/J/K

Networking
Session Chair: Val Henson, IBM

Trickle: A Userland Bandwidth Shaper for UNIX-like Systems
Marius A. Eriksen, Google, Inc.

A Tool for Automated iptables Firewall Analysis
Robert Marmorstein and Phil Kearns, College of William and Mary

Grave Robbers from Outer Space: Using 9P2000 Under Linux
Eric Van Hensbergen, IBM Austin Research Lab; Ron Minnich, Los Alamos National Labs

5:30 p.m.–6:00 p.m. Wednesday
USENIX ANNUAL MEETING
Salon E

Meet the USENIX Association Board of Directors and staff. Get an update on USENIX activities and events. Tell us how we're doing and give us feedback on the conference.

Thursday, April 14, 2005
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Thursday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Defending Against Attacks
Session Chair: David Andersen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Active Internet Traffic Filtering: Real-Time Response to Denial-of-Service Attacks
Katerina Argyraki and David R. Cheriton, Stanford University

Building a Reactive Immune System for Software Services
Stelios Sidiroglou, Michael E. Locasto, Stephen W. Boyd, and Angelos D. Keromytis, Columbia University

Attrition Defenses for a Peer-to-Peer Digital Preservation System
T.J. Giuli, Stanford University; Petros Maniatis, Intel Research; Mary Baker, Hewlett-Packard Labs; David S. H. Rosenthal, Stanford University; Mema Roussopoulos, Harvard University

INVITED TALKS
Salon F

NFSv4
Spencer Shepler, Sun Microsystems

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With NFS version 4, the IETF has provided the first openly defined filesystem protocol. NFSv4 draws upon previous versions of NFS along with characteristics of other distributed filesystems to provide a useful, flexible framework for today's client and server environments. NFSv4 provides strong security through the use of either Kerberos V5, SPKM-3, or LIPKEY. NFSv4 combines the previously disparate set of protocols surrounding NFS into a single protocol. NFSv4 also allows for adaptation to future needs via minor versioning. The details of these features and the rest of the protocol will be reviewed as well as the performance characteristics of today's NFSv4 environment.

FREENIX TRACK
Salon G/H/J/K

Invited Talk
Under the Hood: Open Source Business Models in Context
Stephen R. Walli, Consultant

View presentation slides (PDF)

People debate regularly about whether or not open source software is "good for business," and how one makes money on something given away "for free." They raise concerns over the commoditization effects and portray a gloomy future where open source software will "eat its way" up a stack of functionality until software is valueless.

This talk looks at historical open source companies, then steps back to look under the hood at a broader business context for the dynamics at work to provide a business model for open source software. Part of the story behind Microsoft's community projects will be told along the way.

GURU SESSIONS
Salon 4

Kerberos 5, LDAP, and Samba
Gerald Carter, Samba Team/Hewlett-Packard

Gerald Carter has been a member of the Samba Development Team since 1998. He has published articles with various Web-based magazines and teaches courses as a consultant for several companies. Currently employed by Hewlett-Packard as a Samba developer, Gerald has written books for SAMS Publishing and is the author of the recent LDAP System Administration for O'Reilly Publishing.

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break  
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Thursday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Improving Data Movement
Session Chair: Lucy Cherkasova, Hewlett-Packard Labs

Peer-to-Peer Communication Across Network Address Translators
Bryan Ford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Pyda Srisuresh, Caymas Systems, Inc.; Dan Kegel

Maintaining High-Bandwidth Under Dynamic Network Conditions
Dejan Kostic, Ryan Braud, Charles Killian, Erik Vandekieft, James W. Anderson, Alex C. Snoeren, and Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego

Server Network Scalability and TCP Offload
Doug Freimuth, Elbert Hu, Jason LaVoie, Ronald Mraz, Erich Nahum, Prashant Pradhan, and John Tracey, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

INVITED TALKS
Salon F

10–20x Faster Software Builds
John Ousterhout, Electric Cloud, Inc.

View presentation slides (PDF)

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Almost all software projects with more than a few dozen developers are plagued by slow builds that sap productivity, extend release schedules, and impact product quality. Parallel builds offer the potential of significant speedups, but previous attempts at parallelizing builds have had only modest success, primarily due to the lack of complete dependency information. In this talk I will present the architecture of Electric Cloud, a gmake-compatible build system that uses clusters of inexpensive servers to run massively parallel builds. The key to the Electric Cloud approach is that it deduces dependencies on the fly by monitoring file accesses during the build, so that it knows when it is or isn't safe to run build steps in parallel. I will also describe other aspects of the system, such as its versioning network file system and its use of peer-to-peer protocols for moving file data efficiently. Finally, I will compare Electric Cloud to other approaches such as distcc.

FREENIX TRACK
Salon G/H/J/K

Security Visualization
Session Chair: Crispin Cowan, Immunix

Ourmon and Network Monitoring Performance
James R. Binkley and Bart Massey, Portland State University

Brooery: A Graphical Environment for Analysis of Security-Relevant Network Activity
Christian Kreibich, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

NetState: A Network Version Tracking System
Nancy Durgin, Yuqing Mai, and Jamie Van Randwyk, Sandia National Laboratories

GURU SESSIONS
Salon 4

VoIP with Asterisk
Heison Chak, SOMA Networks Inc.

Heison Chak is a systems and network administrator who works for SOMA Networks, focusing on network management and performance analysis of data and voice networks. Heison has been an active member of the Asterisk community and has delivered tutorials and articles for USENIX since 2004.

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)  
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Thursday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Short Papers I
Session Chair: Atul Adya, Microsoft Research

A Hierarchical Semantic Overlay Approach to P2P Similarity Search
Duc A. Tran, University of Dayton

A Parts-of-File File System
Yoann Padioleau and Olivier Ridoux, Campus Universitaire de Beaulieu

BINDER: An Extrusion-Based Break-In Detector for Personal Computers
Weidong Cui and Randy H. Katz, University of California, Berkeley; Wai-tian Tan, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

Proper: Privileged Operations in a Virtualised System Environment
Steve Muir, Larry Peterson, and Marc Fiuczynski, Princeton University; Justin Cappos and John Hartman, University of Arizona

AMP: Program Context Specific Buffer Caching
Feng Zhou, Rob von Behren, and Eric Brewer, University of California, Berkeley

Automatic Synthesis of Filters to Discard Buffer Overflow Attacks: A Step Towards Realizing Self-Healing Systems
Zhenkai Liang, R. Sekar, and Daniel C. DuVarney, Stony Brook University

INVITED TALKS
Salon F

Thin Clients: Past, Present, and Future
Jason Nieh, Columbia University

View presentation slides (PDF)

Exponential improvements in networking and the management cost and complexity of PCs are driving the reemergence of thin clients. But this is not a return to the past of dumbed-down terminals interfaces and limited functionality. Modern thin clients can provide rich PC application functionality and enable new application services while simplifying system administration and improving system security. These benefits arise from a model of running all application logic on servers which then simply send display updates to the clients. I will examine how thin clients can address today's IT infrastructure problems and I will then discuss challenges and opportunities.

FREENIX TRACK
Salon G/H/J/K

Invited Talk
Mac OS X Tiger: What's New for UNIX Users?

Dave Zarzycki, Senior Engineer, BSD Technology Group, Apple Computer

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Mac OS X "Tiger" contains hundreds of new features, many of them in the open-source UNIX "underpinnings" of the system. This talk will discuss new features in the Kernel, new support for rapid indexing and searching of filesystem data, extended file attribute management, strategies for increased performance and 64 bit application support, various software development tool updates, and Tiger's new subsystems for application logging and daemon/service control.

GURU SESSIONS
Salon 4

Startup Strategy
Stephen Walli, Optaros, Inc.

Stephen Walli is Vice President of Open Source Development Strategy for Optaros, Inc., a consulting services startup. He formerly toiled at Microsoft after founding and working as R&D VP at Softway Systems, another venture capital-backed startup.

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break  
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. Thursday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Short Papers II
Session Chair: Atul Adya, Microsoft Research

Facilitating the Development of Soft Devices
Andrew Warfield, Steven Hand, Keir Fraser, and Tim Deegan, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

Implementing Transparent Shared Memory on Clusters Using Virtual Machines
Matthew Chapman and Gernot Heiser, University of New South Wales and National ICT Australia

Measuring CPU Overhead for I/O Processing in the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor
Ludmila Cherkasova and Rob Gardner, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

Fast Transparent Migration for Virtual Machines
Michael Nelson, Beng-Hong Lim, and Greg Hutchins, VMware, Inc.

Performance of Multithreaded Chip Multiprocessors and Implications for Operating System Design
Alexandra Fedorova, Harvard University and Sun Microsystems; Margo Seltzer, Harvard University; Christopher Small and Daniel Nussbaum, Sun Microsystems

Hyper-Threading Aware Process Scheduling Heuristics
James R. Bulpin and Ian A. Pratt, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

INVITED TALKS
Salon F

Enhancing Network Security through Competitive Cyber Exercises
Colonel Daniel Ragsdale, Ph.D., United States Military Academy

View presentation slides (PDF)

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The security of our information systems is constantly under attack. We propose that to make them safer, we should attack them even more. Setting up a competition where two or more sides try to defend their network against an adversarial team will provide an outlet for new and emerging defensive technologies and techniques. This competition will provide an environment where new defensive tactics can be deployed against real hackers. Two similar events that have been publicized recently are the DEFCON "capture the flag" competition and the military Cyber Defense Exercise. The two competitions follow different paradigms. The DEFCON event set all teams to be both attackers and defenders, while the Cyber Defense Exercise focuses the teams on defensive operations only.

The Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX), an annual competition between students at the five U.S. Service Academies, has developed into an extraordinary exercise where defensive technologies are implemented and tested. During the four years that this exercise has been conducted, the skill and the knowledge levels of the participants has improved so dramatically over the past three years that the CDX has become an excellent testing ground for new and emerging concepts in information assurance.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS REPORTS (WIPS)
Salon G/H/J/K

Session Chair: David Andersen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Short, pithy, and fun, Work-in-Progress reports introduce interesting new or ongoing work. If you have work you would like to share or a cool idea that's not quite ready for publication, send a one- or two-paragraph summary to usenix05wips@usenix.org. We are particularly interested in presenting students' work. A schedule of presentations will be posted at the conference, and the speakers will be notified in advance. Work-in-Progress reports are five-minute presentations; the time limit will be strictly enforced.

GURU SESSIONS
Salon 4

Open Source vs. Corporate Intellectual Property
Stormy Peters, Hewlett-Packard

Stormy Peters works at Hewlett-Packard in Fort Collins, Colorado where she is responsible for HP's open source strategy, policy, and business practices. She works with people inside and outside of HP to determine how open source software is changing the industry. Peters founded HP's Open Source Review Board (HP currently has over 200 products that contain open source software). The division reviews an average of 5 new projects a week that will use open source software.

Friday, April 15, 2005
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. Friday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Speeding Up Things
Session Chair: Erich Nahum, IBM Research

A Portable Kernel Abstraction for Low-Overhead Ephemeral Mapping Management
Khaled Elmeleegy, Anupam Chanda, and Alan L. Cox, Rice University; Willy Zwaenepoel, EPFL

Adaptive Main Memory Compression
Irina Chihaia Tuduce and Thomas Gross, ETH Zürich

Drive-Thru: Fast, Accurate Evaluation of Storage Power Management
Daniel Peek and Jason Flinn, University of Michigan

INVITED TALK/FREENIX TRACK
Salon F

Linux and JPL's Mars Exploration Rover Project: Earth-based Planning, Simulation, and Really Remote Scheduling
Scott Maxwell and Frank Hartman, NASA JPL

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NASA/JPL's Mars Exploration Rover project is the first time a JPL flight project has used Linux systems for critical mission operations. Scott Maxwell and Frank Hartman, two of MER's rover drivers, also wrote the Rover Sequencing and Visualization Program (RSVP), the Linux-based software used on Earth to drive Spirit and Opportunity. Scott and Frank will discuss the software they developed, as well as their experiences using Linux to drive two vehicles across the Martian terrain, a hundred million miles from Earth.

GURU SESSIONS
Salon 3

System Administration
David Parter, University of Wisconsin

David Parter has been a system administrator at the University of Wisconsin since 1991, in addition to serving as Associate Director of the Computer Systems Lab since 1995. He has sat on the SAGE executive committee since December 1999, serving as SAGE President in 2001–2002.

10:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.   Break
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Friday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Large Systems
Session Chair: Jason Nieh, Columbia University

Awarded General Track Best Student Paper Award!
Itanium—A System Implementor's Tale

Charles Gray, University of New South Wales; Matthew Chapman and Peter Chubb, University of New South Wales and National ICT Australia; David Mosberger-Tang, Hewlett-Packard Labs; Gernot Heiser, University of New South Wales and National ICT Australia

Providing Dynamic Update in an Operating System
Andrew Baumann and Gernot Heiser, University of New South Wales and National ICT Australia; Jonathan Appavoo, Dilma Da Silva, Orran Krieger, and Robert W. Wisniewski, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center; Jeremy Kerr, IBM Linux Technology Center

SARC: Sequential Prefetching in Adaptive Replacement Cache
Binny S. Gill and Dharmendra S. Modha, IBM Almaden Research Center

INVITED TALKS
Salon F

Possible Futures for Software
Vernor Vinge, Hugo award-winning sci-fi author of the Across Real Time series, The Witling, True Names, and A Fire Upon the Deep

View presentation slides

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No one knows what software technology will be in twenty years. However, there are variables that will probably drive the outcome, for example, hardware improvements, success at managing large projects, and demand for "secure computing". In this talk, I consider four scenarios for the software future, based on different values for these drivers. There are things to love and things to loathe in these scenarios, but consideration of their various onset symptoms could be helpful in adapting to (or affecting) what really happens in our future.

FREENIX TRACK
Salon G/H/J/K

Multimedia
Session Chair: Andy Adamson, University of Michigan

OpenCSG: A Library for Image-Based CSG Rendering
Florian Kirsch and Jürgen Döllner, University of Potsdam

FreeVGA: Architecture Independent Video Graphics Initialization for LinuxBIOS
Li-Ta Lo, Gregory R. Watson, and Ronald G. Minnich, Los Alamos National Laboratory

The Ethernet Speaker System
David Michael Turner and Vassilis Prevelakis, Drexel University

GURU SESSIONS
Salon 3

Databases
John Sellens, SYONEX

John Sellens has been involved in system and network administration since 1986 and is the author of several related USENIX papers, a number of ;login: articles, and the SAGE Short Topics in System Administration booklet #7, System and Network Administration for Higher Reliability. He avoided using databases as long as possible, but now finds them (almost) indispensable (but still makes a lot of use of the "classic" UFS database).

12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
2:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Friday
GENERAL TRACK
Salon E

Improving OS Components
Session Chair: Vivek Pai, Princeton University

SLINKY: Static Linking Reloaded
Christian Collberg, John H. Hartman, Sridivya Babu, and Sharath K. Udupa, University of Arizona

CLOCK-Pro: An Effective Improvement of the CLOCK Replacement
Song Jiang, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Feng Chen and Xiaodong Zhang, College of William and Mary

Group Ratio Round-Robin: O(1) Proportional Share Scheduling for Uniprocessor and Multiprocessor Systems
Bogdan Caprita, Wong Chun Chan, Jason Nieh, Clifford Stein, and Haoqiang Zheng, Columbia University

INVITED TALKS
Salon F

Flying Linux
Dan Klein, USENIX

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We all know that "Linux is better than Windows." Few intelligent people would board a fly-by-wire airplane that was controlled by Microsoft Windows. So how about Linux? When your life is at stake, your attitudes change considerably. Better than Windows, yes—but better enough? This talk will look at what it takes to make software truly mission-critical and man-rated. We'll go back to the earliest fly-by-wire systems—Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—and look at such diverse (but critical!) issues as compartmentalization, trojans and terrorism, auditing and accountability, bugs and boundary conditions, distributed authoring, and revision control. At the end of this talk, what you thought might be an easy answer will be seen to be not so easy.

FREENIX TRACK
Salon G/H/J/K

Measurement
Session Chair: Karen Hackett, Sun Microsystems

A PC-Based Open-Source Voting Machine with an Accessible Voter-Verifiable Paper Ballot
Arthur M. Keller, UC Santa Cruz and Open Voting Consortium; Alan Dechert, Open Voting Consortium; Karl Auerbach, InterWorking Labs; David Mertz, Gnosis Software, Inc.; Amy Pearl, Software Innovations; Joseph Lorenzo Hall, UC Berkeley SIMS

Auto-pilot: A Platform for System Software Benchmarking
Charles P. Wright, Nikolai Joukov, Devaki Kulkarni, Yevgeniy Miretskiy, and Erez Zadok, Stony Brook University

Interactive Performance Measurement with VNCPlay
Nickolai Zeldovich and Ramesh Chandra, Stanford University

GURU SESSIONS
Salon 3

Security
Rik Farrow, Security Consultant

Rik Farrow provides UNIX and Internet security consulting and training. He has been working with UNIX system security since 1984 and with TCP/IP networks since 1988. He has taught at the IRS, Department of Justice, NSA, NASA, US West, Canadian RCMP, Swedish Navy, and for many US and European user groups. He is the author of UNIX System Security, published by Addison-Wesley in 1991, and System Administrator's Guide to System V (Prentice Hall, 1989). Farrow writes a column for ;login: and a network security column for Network magazine.

3:30 p.m.–4:00 p.m.   Break
4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m. Friday
USENIX GAME SHOW
Salon E

Closing out this year's conference, the USENIX Game Show will pit attendees against each other in a test of technical knowledge and cultural trivia. Host Rob Kolstad and sidekick Dan Klein will provide the questions and color commentary for this always memorable event.

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Last changed: 19 Oct. 2007 ac