From Sep 1-4, the conference on Network Centric Systems (NetSys 2025) with 140 registered participants was held in Ilmenau and locally organized by the DSOS research group.
Foto: Peter Amthor
The conference series is organized biannually by the special interest groups KuVS and ITG of the German Informatics Society (GI) and the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies (VDE), respectively. The conference aims to facilitate networking and the exchange of ideas on current topics in the fields of distributed systems and computer networks.An interview on the background of the conference with Prof. Koldehofe is available as part of the Uni Online article “Networked in the “Internet of Everything”: International conference at TU Ilmenau discusses networks of the future”.
The CogniGron Research Center and the Distributed Systems Research Groups of TU Ilmenau and University of Groningen have organized a workshop to discuss research findings, initiatives, and challenges for Sustainability in Distributed and Networked Systems.
Researchers from the University of Groningen, TU Ilmenau, and TU Darmstadt met to exchange on initiatives like the CogniGron research center, the Ilmenau School of Green electronics, the collaborative research center MAKI, and a new project on green business process management. Furthermore, the workshop enabled in the form of excellent presentations of young researchers to exchange research findings towards sustainability in distributed and networked systems by taking the hardware and software perspectives. A particular highlight of the workshop was the dissertation talk of Saad Saleh on „Methods and Design for Analog Computing Architectures Memristors for Enhancing Expressiveness and Energy-Efficiency of Packet Processors. “ Saad Saleh successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on Jan 7.
Workshop Program:
09:00 Welcome and Overview
09:10 Introduction of Research Teams of Darmstadt, Ilmenau and Groningen
Prof. Ralf Steinmetz: Future Internet Research at the Collaborative Research Center MAKI
Prof. Beatriz Noheda (UG): The CogniGron Research Center at the University of Groningen
Prof. Alexander Lazovik: Research overview at Groningen, Distributed Systems
Prof. Boris Koldehofe: Research overview at Ilmenau
10:30–10:50 Coffee/tea break
10:50–12:15 Network and Hardware centric perspective
Dr. Peter Amthor (TU Ilmenau): The Ilmenau School of Green Electronics
Last week I visited the 18th Conference on Distributed and Event Based Systems (DEBS) in Lyon. Our research team has been very active in the topics of DEBS for many years as well as contributed to the organization of many instances of DEBS in the past.
Overall, this years edition showed that there is still a very active community. I enjoyed very good talks and papers on topics covering a wide range of topics related to distributed data and event processing, such as fundamentals, systems aspects, and programming paradigms. The research program, keynotes and tutorials presented covered deep insights into recent developments of data stream processing systems and data processing applications such as IoT and the DEBS Grand Challenge competition.
Congratulations to the winners of the DEBS 10 Years Test of Time Award to Thomas Heinze, Zbigniew Jerzak, Gregor Hackenbroich, and Christof Fetzer for their work on “Latency-aware elastic scaling for distributed data stream processing systems.”
Thanks a lot, to the organizing team around Riccardo Tommasini, Angela Bonifati, Tillmann Rabl and Avrilia Floratou. Looking forward to another edition organized by Vincenzo Gulisano and Marina Papatriantafilou in Gothenburg, Sweden in June 10-13, 2025.
Finally, I would like to share some recent works of our team covering serveal interesting research directions in the context of DEBS.
Bochra Boughzhala and Boris Koldehofe. In-Network Management of Parallel Data Streams over Programmable Data Planes. In Proceedings of the 2024 IFIP Networking Conference, 9 pages, 2024. IFIP.
Pratyush Agnihotri, Boris Koldehofe, Paul Stiegele, Roman Heinrich, Carsten Binnig, Manisha Luthra. ZeroTune: Learned Zero-Shot Cost Model for Parallelism Tuning in Stream Processing. In Proceedings of the IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2024), IEEE, 2024.
Majid Lotfian Delouee, Victoria Degeler, Peter Amthor, and Boris Koldehofe. APP-CEP: Adaptive Pattern-level Privacy Protection in Complex Event Processing Systems. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP’24), 12 pages, SCITEPRESS.
Yesterday (Nov 29), I had the pleasure to present at the ACM Workshop on hot topics in networking (HotNets) how analog components, in particularmemristors, can improve energie efficiency and expressiveness of current packet processing architectures. We propose a new programming abstraction named PCAM which accounts in contrast to TCAM memory for the analog nature memristive components. The work has been conducted in the context of the CogniGron research center. More details, on the paper “The Future is Analog: Energy-Efficient Cognitive Network Functions over Memristor-Based Analog Computations” you can find in the ACM digital library. Special congratulations to Saad Saleh for doing a great job in developing and evaluating PCAM! Finally, thanks to the HotNets organizers for a great event with many exciting propositions for future networking research.
After being officially welcomed at TU Ilmenau, Boris Koldehofe gave his inaugural lecture at TU Ilmenau on Nov 1st 2023. In his talk named “Accelerating the performance of data driven applications with in-network computing” he discussed how advances in programmable networks can aid to accelerate data-intensive applications in form of in-network computing. Besides discussing technical solutions and research challenges he highlighted also recent research towards energy-efficient in-network computing architectures.
Interested to work towards a Ph.D. in distributed systems? The Distributed and Operating Systems Group has opened two research positions with a focus on distributed in-network computing. You can find more details about the position and how to apply at the official web pages of TU Ilmenau:
On February 1st, Boris Koldehofe was appointed by the president of TU Ilmenau, Prof. Dr. Kai Uwe Sattler, as Professor of the university. He will be heading the Distributed Systems and Operating Group at the Faculty of Computer Science and the Institute of Applied Computer Science. Boris Koldehofe will continue to collaborate with the University of Groningen and remains a TU Darmstadt fellow as part of the CRC MAKI.
Saad Saleh presented a novel memory architecture TCAmMCogniGron at the IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing, 2022. The proposed architecture TCAmMCogniGron is designed to replace a highly energy intensive memory, named Ternary content addressable memory (TCAM), used in almost all current network switches and routers to store processing rules and forward traffic through the Internet. TCAmMCogniGron enables the general purpose integration of special energy saving materials, named Memristors, which allow to keep the processing rules in form of a state, often represented in form of resistance, and this state is non-volatile. In collaboration with Anouk S. Goossens and Tamalika Banerjee from Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials characteristics of a physical memristor built at the CogniGron research center were studied. The findings demonstrate the high energy efficiency and extreme resiliency of the proposed design. The research concluded that in addition to supporting non-volatile state so-called match and mismatch operations require only about 1–16 femtojoules of energy.
Interested to learn more about the potential of memristive devices to a more energy-friendly Internet, please check out the following research works including a recent survey studying the use of memristive devices for performing energy efficient operations using novel computing architectures in the Internet.
Saad Saleh and Boris Koldehofe. On Memristors for Enabling Energy Efficient and Enhanced Cognitive Network Functions. IEEE Access, 34 pages, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3226447
Congratulations to Manisha Luthra! Manisha was awarded with a dissertation award for her PhD thesis “Network-centric Complex Event Processing” by the German Special Interest group on Communications and Distributed Systems (KuVs) of “Gesellschaft für Informatik” (GI).
Dissertation Ceremony of Manisha in 2021
Manisha Luthra was co-advised by Ralf Steinmetz und Boris Koldehofe in the context of the DFG Collaborative Research Center MAKI. Manisha is now Postdoctoral researcher at the Systems Group of TU Darmstadt. Furthermore, she started recently a new position as senior researcher at the SAIDE Lab of German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) led by Carsten Binnig.
The Rosalind Franklin Fellow program of the University of Groningen has opened several positions as Tenure Track Assistant/Associate Professor for female researchers with three positions at the Bernoulli Institute. One position is dedicated to distributed or network-centric systems research. Candidates with a strong background in this area can apply via the RUG online application portal until Oct 27th 2022.
