MSRA

(Reprinted from USTC Innovation Foundation)

The top international academic conference in the field of computer systems, SOSP 2017 (Symposium on Operating Systems Principles), was recently held in Shanghai. Since the first SOSP in 1967, most of the content in textbooks on operating systems and distributed systems has come from the SOSP conference. Therefore, researchers in the system field generally regard publishing papers at SOSP as an honor. Among the 39 papers accepted by SOSP this year, only two first authors are from mainland China, including the KV-Direct system co-authored by Li Bojie, a third-year doctoral student, and Ruan Zhenyuan, a senior undergraduate student from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). This is also the first time that USTC has published a paper at SOSP. As an undergraduate, how did Ruan Zhenyuan step by step achieve USTC’s “breakthrough from zero” at the SOSP conference?

(Reprinted from Microsoft Research Asia)

The international academic conference on computer system architecture, SOSP 2017 (Symposium on Operating Systems Principles), is currently being held in Shanghai. As one of the top academic conferences in the field of computer systems, if a paper is fortunate enough to be included, its influence is self-evident. Not long ago, a paper on memory key-value storage by Bojie Li, a doctoral student jointly trained by Microsoft Research Asia and the University of Science and Technology of China, was included in the conference. For most people outside the computer industry, “memory key-value storage” is a blind spot in brain knowledge, a deep sea for the ship of curiosity. But for Bojie Li, born in 1992, this has become a part of his life. His growth story can be told from this word that is strange to us but very familiar to him.

(Reposted from Microsoft Research Asia)

From June 19-20, 2017, the open source technology event LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen (LC3) was held in China for the first time. The two-day agenda was packed, including 17 keynote speeches, 88 technical reports from 8 sub-venues, and technical exhibitions and hands-on experiments from companies like Microsoft. LinuxCon attracted many international and domestic internet giants, telecom giants, and thousands of industry professionals, including Linux founder Linus Torvalds, to gather and focus on industry trends.

(This article was first published on Zhihu, and then reposted on Microsoft Research Asia)

We are not using FPGA to replace CPU, but using FPGA to accelerate the computing tasks suitable for it, and other tasks are still completed on the CPU, allowing FPGA and CPU to work together.

This answer will cover three questions:

1. Why use FPGA, what are the characteristics compared to CPU, GPU, ASIC (dedicated chip)?
2. Where is Microsoft’s FPGA deployed? How do FPGAs communicate with each other and with CPUs?
3. What role should FPGA play in the future cloud computing platform? Is it just a computing accelerator card like GPU?

(Reprinted from Microsoft Research Asia)

As the oldest top academic conference in the field of computer networks, ACM SIGCOMM has been held 37 times since 1977. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) proudly calls SIGCOMM its annual flagship conference on its homepage. Over the past 40 years, from the TCP congestion control protocol in computer network textbooks to Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in cloud data centers, SIGCOMM has witnessed the birth and development of many key technologies in computer networks.

SIGCOMM papers are known for their high quality, with only about 40 accepted each year, an acceptance rate of around 15%. Network researchers around the world regard publishing papers at SIGCOMM as an honor. Each paper undergoes rigorous double-blind review, for example, this year there were three rounds of review, the first round selected 99 out of 225 papers, the second round selected 66, and the third round selected 60 for Program Committee (PC) discussion, deciding on the final 39 accepted papers after a day and a half of meetings. Each accepted paper received an average of 8 review comments, spanning dozens of pages. Even if not ultimately accepted, the opinions of these expert reviewers are very helpful for subsequent improvements to the paper.

March 18th was the student open day of the IEEE 802 plenary session held in Beijing. I was invited by MSRA to attend. The participants in the standard-setting process are all professionals, and I was basically like Granny Liu visiting the Grand View Garden, just there for the amusement. Since photography and recording were prohibited at the venue, and the technical documents discussed at the meeting were not public, there are no pictures or solid evidence to share.

First, let me explain what IEEE 802 is. IEEE 802 is a committee under IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), responsible for the establishment of local area network and metropolitan area network standards. The physical layer and link layer protocols of computer networks are basically established by this organization. IEEE 802 holds three plenary sessions each year, most of which are held in North America. Voting rights are granted from the third participation in the plenary session.

IEEE 802 has several working groups, for example, 802.3 is responsible for Ethernet, which is the wired network we use; 802.11 is responsible for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), commonly known as wifi. Each working group still has a lot to do. For example, Ethernet has 100M, 1G, 10G, 40G, 100G, and the 400G under research. Not only are the speeds different, but the transmission media used are also different; WLAN has 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad standards, not only are the speeds different, but the frequency bands used are also different. Therefore, each working group has Task Forces and Study Groups.

Above picture (click to enlarge): Our Xbox team’s first-place work in today’s activity. The competition was to create the tallest and most beautiful “tower” within 20 minutes using several chopsticks, newspapers, a roll of tape, and a glue stick. The Xbox team scored 100 points for height (the highest) and 70 points for aesthetics, totaling 170 points, winning first place among the 10 teams on site.

At 19:00 on August 23, the “Ice-breaking Journey” of the 0th day of the 2013 Microsoft Student Summer Camp was held on the first floor of Microsoft Building Tower #1. (To complain about the name, “Ice-breaking Journey”, I thought it was a negotiation with the opposing camp) Nearly 200 Microsoft scholars and representatives of Microsoft student clubs from universities across the country participated in the event. As soon as the event started, the host’s phrase “let everyone get to know each other” shocked everyone.

As per the requirements of the Microsoft Scholars Program, I am to provide some suggestions for Bing’s products. I noticed that at MSRA, it seems that most people use Google. Why don’t they use Microsoft’s own Bing? Here are some technical comparisons.

Exact Matching Capability

The search keyword is “b4: experience with a globally-deployed software defined wan”, which is a paper from SIGCOMM 2013, announced around June.

In Google, only three keywords were entered, and the autocomplete has already come out. The first result is the paper itself, the second is the official SIGCOMM website, and all 10 results on the first page are relevant.