========================================================== CALL FOR PAPERS 20th Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing (VHPC '25) held in conjunction with the European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Aug 25-29, 2025, Dresden, Germany. (Springer LNCS Proceedings) ========================================================== Paper submission deadline: May 25th, 2025 AoE (extended) Date: August 25, 2025 Workshop URL: vhpc dot org To submit an abstract or paper, please follow the link provided in the Call for Papers (CfP) announcement at the end of this message. Call for Papers This year, we are calling the timely topic of virtualization in support of high-memory LLM training workloads including, but not limited to: - GPU hypervisor memory virtualization: Techniques for virtualizing GPU memory to allow flexible and efficient allocation across multiple workloads, enabling higher utilization of GPU resources - Flat CPU/GPU memory page tables/TLB: Unified virtual memory spaces and page table structures that allow both GPUs to address CPU memory mapped to accelerator global memory space - Storage/filesystem to virtual memory mapped approaches - Distributed memory virtualization - Memory compression and reduction techniques: approaches for compressing model parameters, activations, and gradients to reduce memory requirements during training - Out-of-core training algorithms - Efficient memory allocation and management: Techniques for optimizing memory allocation, reducing fragmentation, and improving memory utilization during training - Memory-efficient data formats and processing: Data formats and processing techniques that minimize memory overhead while maintaining training efficiency - Benchmarking and profiling tools: Tools and methodologies for measuring, analyzing, and optimizing memory usage in LLM training workloads - Case studies and applications: Real-world examples and applications of virtualization techniques in LLM training scenarios The Workshop on Virtualization in High-Performance Cloud Computing (VHPC) aims to bring together researchers and industrial practitioners facing the challenges posed by virtualization in order to foster discussion, collaboration, mutual exchange of knowledge and experience, enabling research to ultimately provide novel solutions for virtualized computing systems of tomorrow. Containers and virtualization technologies constitute key enabling factors for flexible resource management in modern data centers, and particularly in cloud environments. Cloud providers need to manage complex infrastructures in a seamless fashion to support the highly dynamic and heterogeneous workloads and hosted applications customers deploy. Similarly, HPC environments have been increasingly adopting techniques that enable flexible management of vast computing and networking resources, close to marginal provisioning cost, which is unprecedented in the history of scientific and commercial computing. Various virtualization-containerization technologies contribute to the overall picture in different ways: machine virtualization, with its capability to enable consolidation of multiple underutilized servers with heterogeneous software and operating systems (OSes), and its capability to live-migrate a fully operating virtual machine (VM) with a very short downtime, enables novel and dynamic ways to manage physical servers; OS-level virtualization (i.e., containerization), with its capability to isolate multiple user-space environments and to allow for their co-existence within the same OS kernel, promises to provide many of the advantages of machine virtualization with high levels of responsiveness and performance; lastly, unikernels provide for manyvirtualization benefits with a minimized OS/library surface. I/O virtualization, in turn, allows physical network interfaces to exchange traffic with multiple VMs or containers; network virtualization, with its capability to create logical network overlays independently from the underlying physical topology, is another fundamental enabling technology for Cloud/HPC infrastructures. Last, storage virtualization needs to evolve to support increasingly demanding requirements in terms of performance and reliability for the managed application data. Publication Accepted papers will be published in a Springer LNCS proceedings volume. Topics of Interest The VHPC program committee solicits original, high-quality submissions related to virtualization across the entire software stack with a special focus on the intersection of HPC, containers/ virtualization and cloud computing. Each topic encompasses aspects related to design/architecture, management, performance management, modeling and\ configuration/tooling: Design / Architecture: - Containers and OS-level virtualization (LXC, Docker/Podman, Nitro/Firecracke, Singularity) - Hypervisor support for heterogeneous resources (GPUs, NPUs, co-processors, FPGAs, etc.) - GPU hypervisor memory virtualization in support of high-memory LLM training workloads - Hypervisor extensions to mitigate side-channel attacks ([micro-]architectural timing attacks, privilege escalation) - Use of Risc-V related technologies for cloud, virtualized and HPC use-cases - VM & Container trust and security models - Multi-environment coupling, system software supporting in-situ analysis with HPC simulation - Cloud reliability, fault-tolerance and high-availability - Cloud-based quantum compute services - Energy-efficient and power-aware virtualization - Containers inside VMs with hypervisor isolation - Virtualization support for emerging memory and storage technologies - Lightweight/specialized operating systems in conjunction with virtual machines - Unikernels and use cases for virtualized HPC environments - Formal definition and verification of hypervisors and virtualization system properties - ARM-based hypervisors, ARM virtualization extensions Management: - Container and VM management for HPC and cloud environments - Virtualized/Cloudified instances to support Lambda / Function-as-a- Service (FaaS) Paradigms - HPC services integration, services to support HPC - Service and on-demand scheduling & resource management - Dedicated workload management with VMs or containers - Workflow coupling with VMs and containers - Unikernels and lightweight VM application management - Environments and tools for operating containerized environments (batch, orchestration) - Models for non-HPC workload provisioning on HPC resources Performance Measurements and Modeling: - Performance improvements for or driven by unikernels - Optimizations of virtual machine monitor platforms and hypervisors - Scalability analysis of VMs and/or containers at large scale - Performance measurement, modeling and monitoring of virtualized/ cloud workloads - Virtualization in supercomputing environments, HPC clusters, HPC in the cloud with an emphasis on AI GPUs/TPUs/NPUs - Energy-efficient deployment of high-performance, ultra-low latency and real-time workloads in cloud infrastructures - Modeling, control and isolation of end-to-end performance for parallel & distributed cloud/HPC applications, including the use of cloud functions / FaaS Configuration / Tooling: - Tool support for unikernels: configuration/build environments, debuggers, profilers - Job scheduling/control/policy and container placement in virtualized environments - Measuring and controlling "OS/Virtualization noise" - Operating MPI in containers/VMs and Unikernels - GPU virtualization operationalization The workshop will be one day in length, composed of 20 min paper presentations, each followed by 10 min discussion sections, plus lightning talks that are limited to 5 minutes. Presentations may be accompanied by interactive demonstrations. Important Dates Rolling abstract submission May 25th, 2025 AoE (extended) - Paper submission deadline Jun 23th, 2025 - Acceptance notification Jul 2, 2025 - Camera-ready due Aug 25, 2025 - Workshop Day Chair Michael Alexander (chair), Austrian Academy of Sciences Anastassios Nanos (co-chair), Nubificus Ltd., UK Tentative Technical Program Committee Stergios Anastasiadis, University of Ioannina, Greece Gabriele Ara, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna Jakob Blomer, CERN, Switzerland Eduardo César, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain Taylor Childers, Argonne National Laboratory, USA François Diakhaté, CEA DAM, France Roberto Giorgi, University of Siena, Italy Kyle Hale, Northwestern University, USA Giuseppe Lettieri, University of Pisa, Italy Nikos Parlavantzas, IRISA, France Amer Qouneh, Western New England University, USA Carlos Reaño, Queen’s University Belfast, UK Riccardo Rocha, CERN, Switzerland Lutz Schubert, University of Ulm, Germany Jonathan Sparks, Cray, USA Kurt Tutschku, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden John Walters, USC ISI, USA - Yasuhiro Watashiba, Osaka University, Japan Chao-Tung Yang, Tunghai University, Taiwan Paper Submission-Publication Papers submitted to the workshop will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee and external reviewers. Submissions should include abstract, keywords, the e-mail address of the corresponding author, and must not exceed 12 pages, including tables and figures at a main font size no smaller than 11 points. Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will register and attend the conference to present the work. Accepted papers will be published in a Springer LNCS volume. Initial submissions are in PDF; authors of accepted papers will be requested to provide source files. Lightning Talks Lightning Talks are in a non-paper track, synoptical in nature and are strictly limited to 5 minutes. They can be used to gain early feedback on ongoing research, for demonstrations, to present research results, early research ideas, perspectives and positions of interest to the community. Submit abstracts via the main submission link. General Information The workshop will be held in conjunction with the International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing on Aug 25, 2025, Dresden, Germany. Please contact ahead of time for presenting remotely via video. Abstract, Paper Submission Link: https://edas.info/N33172 LNCS Format Guidelines: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-gui... Follow VHPC Updates on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/vhpc.bsky.social