Gustavo Alonso
7 November 2013, 04:15 pm
“Need for Speed: Building Big Data Platforms”
Venue: S2|02 room C110 (Robert-Piloty building, Hochschulstr. 10, 64289 Darmstadt)
Abstract:
Big data and the NoSQL movement are just manifestations of a number of trends on the way data is processed and the type of services built on top of data. One the one hand, Internet, mobile telephones, social networks, on-line advertisement, and the proliferation of digital services have resulted in unseen demands on existing data platforms. On the other hand, the complexity of the queries, the need to support strict SLAs, and the wide variety of data types call for new approaches in the design of data processing engines. At the same time, the underlying hardware platforms are evolving at an amazing speed, changing many of the established assumptions about how to build software systems.
In this talk I will cover SwissBox, a long term, umbrella project at the Systems Group at ETH Zurich, where we are redesigning data processing engines from the ground up to adapt them to modern workloads. The project covers from hardware acceleration and operating system – database codesign, to radically new ways of organizing the engine's architecture and novel strategies to exploit multi-core hardware. Part of the system is already used commercially and the results obtained so far indicate the performance and the guarantees that can be provided with the new architecture exceed by orders of magnitude what can be achieved today.
Short Bio:
research covers systems from design to runtime. He is particularly interested in distributed systems, databases, and middleware. His current focus lies on adapting ‘traditional‘ systems software to novel hardware platforms. Gustavo completed his PhD in Computer Science at UCSB (Santa Barbara, CA) in 1994. After working for the IBM Almaden Research Center, he joined ETH Zurich in 1995, where he became assistant professor in 1998 and was appointed full professor in 2001. He is a faculty member in the Systems Group and the Enterprise Computing Center at ETHZ, currently. Gustavo‘s