Gustavo Alonso gives an invited talk at the Systems Area Lunch Seminar at the National University of Singapore (NUS)

Gustavo Alonso gave the talk “Tackling System Architecture in the Cloud Era” at the Systems Area Lunch Seminar series of the School of Computing of the National University of Singapore (NUS)

Abstract:
In this talk I will present a long term research program we have been pursuing at the Systems Group at ETH over more than a decade. The work has been motivated, first, by the changes introduced by cloud computing, the trend towards heterogeneous computing, and the ever increasing demands of applications in terms of data sizes and performance. However, a second important motivation has been to create an eco-system where we and other researchers can explore innovation in an IT world that is increasingly departing from the trends in the last decades towards compatibility at the software and hardware level, common standards, and a shared understanding between academia and industry of the research problems to tackle. I will first cover the background for the work we are doing as it is crucial to understand how we see where the IT industry is going. Then I will go over our efforts to, e.g., create an operating system for reconfigurable accelerators (Coyote), open source network stacks (TCP/IP and RDMA), higher level interfaces to accelerators (HTTPS), smart NICs, near-data accelerators, etc. I will conclude with our work on Enzian, an open source hw-sw platform built to explore many of the new trends in hardware heterogeneity including cache coherency, memory management, accelerators, etc. Along the way I will briefly show examples of the systems we have developed on our own or together with partners from industry with the goal of showing the large number of opportunities open to researchers in this new era. As a side, I will also explain how we operate within the Systems Group and why we believe that research groups need to build a critical mass in numbers and expertise to remain competitive.