•   When: Monday, September 21, 2015 from 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM
•   Speakers: Ozalp Babaoglu
•   Location: Nguyen Engineering, Room 4201
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Abstract

Continued reliance on human operators for managing data centers is a major impediment for them from ever reaching extreme dimensions. In this talk, I will outline some new ideas towards data-driven autonomics that can enable the exascale data centers of the future. In my vision, large computer systems in general, and data centers in particular, will ultimately be managed using predictive computational and executable models obtained through data-science tools, and at that point, the intervention of humans will be limited to setting high-level goals and policies rather than performing ?nuts-and-bolts? operations. I believe that we are at a technological inflection point with the confluence of ideas from distributed systems, data science, statistical machine learning, computational modeling, network science and complexity science such that an interdisciplinary effort will be able to fit together all pieces of this puzzle and solve the grand challenge. The breakthrough I envision is an operator-less exascale data center where management and control are based on predictive holistic models. These models will include not only the computer system as such, but also its geographical, physical and socio-political environment. This development will be a game changer in how large data centers are managed and controlled, enabling scales and efficiencies that are currently unimaginable.

Speaker's Bio

Ozalp Babaoglu is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bologna. He received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley. Babaoglu's virtual memory extensions to AT&T Unix as a graduate student at UC Berkeley became the basis for a long line of ?BSD Unix? distributions. He is the recipient of 1982 Sakrison Memorial Award, 1989 UNIX International Recognition Award and 1993 USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the Unix system community and to Open Industry Standards. Before moving to Bologna in 1988, Babaoglu was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he conducted research on distributed systems and fault-tolerance. Since moving to Italy, he has been active in numerous European research projects in distributed computing and complex systems including BROADCAST, CABERNET, ADAPT and DELIS. In 2001 he co-founded the Bertinoro international center for informatics (BiCi). Since its inception, this Italian Dagstuhl has organized more than 150 prestigious scientific meetings/schools and has had thousands of young researchers from all over the world pass through its doors. In 2002 Babaoglu was made a Fellow of the ACM for his ?contributions to fault-tolerant distributed computing, BSD Unix, and for leadership in the European distributed systems community?. In 2007, he co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO) conference series and has been a member of its Steering Committee since inception and has served as co-general chair for the 2007 and 2013 editions. Since 2013, he has been on the Selection Committee for the ACM Heidelberg Laureate Forum which brings together young researchers in Computer Science and Mathematics with Abel, Fields and Turing Laureates. He currently serves on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems. Previously, he served for two decades on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and Springer-Verlag Distributed Computing.