Computing at the limits of technology calls for numerous engineering decisions and tradeoffs. General purpose solutions do not work at the extremes. Traditional HPC has been analyzed for decades, resulting in specialized architectures. Systems for life critical systems, those for large enterprises, those for tiny devices, also present their own special requirements.
The area of data intensive computing is newer, and the computing models are less established. To support large (millions) of users doing similar but different computations, expecting to have access to enormous amounts of information (petabytes, not gigabytes) and to get prompt responses and global access calls for different compromises. Different applications present their own requirements and difficulties.
This talk will address some of those needs – different models of storage and data management that are appropriate for different types of application, networking demands for parallelism and global access, management of large numbers of fallible processors and storage. Support for such computing also calls for different approaches to software methodology, system management, and deployment. But massive data also opens new ways to approach science and to get remarkable results, ranging from fast advertising (yes,it’s very hard) to language translation to (of course) search.
Speaker Biography
Stuart Feldman, Vice President Engineering, Google Stu is responsible for engineering activities at Google’s offices in the eastern part of the Americas, with projects affecting most of the company’s focus areas. He is also responsible for several important Google products. Stu did his academic work in astrophysics and mathematics and earned his AB at Princeton and his PhD at MIT. He is Past President of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and received the 2003 ACM Software System Award. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the AAAS, a member of the Board of Directors of the AACSB (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, International). He serves on a number of government advisory committees. After graduating, Stu was a computer science researcher at Bell Labs and a research manager at Bellcore. In addition he was the creator of Make as well as the architect for a large new line of software products at Bellcore. He then worked at IBM. Most recently, he was Vice President for Computer Science in IBM Research, where he drove the long-term and exploratory worldwide science strategy in computer science and related fields, led programs for open collaborative research with universities, and influenced national and global computer science policy. Prior to that, Stu served as Vice President for Internet Technology and was responsible for IBM strategies, standards, and policies relating to the future of the Internet, and managed a department that created experimental Internet-based applications. Earlier, he was the founding Director of IBM’s Institute for Advanced Commerce, which was dedicated to creating intellectual leadership in e-commerce.