Plug into the Supercloud -Talk by Hakim Weatherspoon, Cornell University

SPEAKER: Hakim Weatherspoon, Cornell University

HOST: Andrew Warfield

TITLE: Plug into the Supercloud

ABSTRACT: Our society has changed. It has changed from being enabled by the network and data stored within it to making increasingly frequent use of networked systems—the cloud; if the trend continues, we will soon reach a point of true dependency, much as we depend upon electricity, cars and telephones. The cloud must be available and we need continuous access to our data. In a sense, this situation was envisioned nearly 50 years ago with a vision some referred to using the phrase “computing as a utility” (Multics: 1965; 24/7 access to data and computation). Unfortunately, however, particularly in light of this growing dependence upon the network and the cloud, and the associated need for security, availability, and other assurance properties, today’s cloud is simply not ready for the roles we are asking it to play. Needed are new guarantees of security of data and integrity of computation (especially across administrative domains) and cloud interoperability. In this talk, describe a new cloud model, called a Supercloud, that address these challenges. A Supercloud decouples cloud users from the cloud provider and allows cloud users transparent and simultaneous control over a diverse set of cloud provider resources such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, VMWare vCloud Air, HP Cloud, and many private clouds. I will present the design and implementation of the Supercloud and demonstrate how users and applications can benefit from the power and capability that it provides.

BIO: Hakim Weatherspoon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research interests cover various aspects of fault-tolerance, reliability, security, and performance of large Internet-scale (and rack-scale!) systems such as cloud computing and distributed systems. He received his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley and B.S. from University of Washington. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and recipient of an NSF CAREER award, DARPA Computer Science Study Panel (CSSP), IBM Faculty Award, the NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Intel Early Career Faculty Honor, and the Future Internet Architecture award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

More information about Hakim is available online at his research group website http://fireless.cs.cornell.edu and/or personal website http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~hweathe/