Distributed and Operating Systems

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 particular memristors, 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.

More information:

• Bochra Boughzala, Christoph Gärtner, and Boris Koldehofe. Window-based Parallel Operator Execution with In-Network Computing. Proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS ’22), pp. 91–96, ACM press.
• Ralf Kundel and Fridolin Siegmund and Rhaban Hark and Amr Rizk and Boris Koldehofe. Network Testing Utilizing Programmable Networking Hardware. IEEE Communications Magazine, 7 pages, IEEE 2022.
• Bowmik, Tariq, Koldehofe, Kohler, Dürr, Rothermel. High Performance Publish/Subscribe Middleware in Software-defined Networks. IEEE Transactions on Networking (ToN), 2016.

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:

Official JobPosting at TU Ilmenau

For further questions do not hesitate to contact directly Boris Koldehofe!