Alumni/Industry Lecture: Andrew Warfield - Keeping up with the Architects: Software Evolution for Dense Datacenters

Date

Date: Thurs., April 27, 2017

Time:6 - 7:30 pm.  Networking starts at 6 pm, talk begins at 6:30 pm. Light refreshments will be served.

Location: ACL, 14th Floor, 980 Howe St. Vancouver

RSVP: Please rsvp below.

Speaker: Professor Andrew Warfield, Associate Professor, UBC Department of Computer Science; Co-Founder & CTO, Coho Data

Tiltle: Ultra-dense Computing

Abstract: 

Computing hardware is undergoing massive change.  While Moore's law has slowed on CPU performance, a number of other factors are conspiring to allow us to build single racks of computers that would have taken an entire warehouse to build only 10 years ago.  UBC's Andrew Warfield will talk about the consequences of performance density within the datacenter, not just from an infrastructure perspective, but also in terms of its impact on application-level development, and for technology businesses in general.

Datacenter hardware is currently evolving at a rate that we, as software developers, are completely unfamiliar with.  These changes, which span rack-scale form factors, emerging I/O technologies, and the deployment of specialized processors are resulting in performance-dense datacenter environments that look absolutely nothing like the ones that developers were writing code for even five years ago.

In this talk, Andrew will quickly overview a few interesting hardware trends and their consequences for software. He will summarize his experiences in developing a commercial rack-scale software-based storage system as an example of a subset of this space.  Finally, he will step back and point to some of the assumptions implicit in the software stacks that we use today that are a burdensome liability in the face of trying to actually distil value from the rapid innovation that is happening in datacenter hardware.  

Bio: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~andy/

Many thanks to ACL for hosting the lecture.

For more information about connecting with UBC Department of Computer Science, please contact Michele Ng mng@cs.ubc.ca.  

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