Alumni/Industry Lecture: Andrew Warfield - Keeping up with the architects: Software evolution for dense datacenters
Past Dates
Date: Thurs., April 27, 2017
Time: Networking starts at 6 pm, talk begins at 6:30 pm
Location: ACL, 14th Floor, 980 Howe St. Vancouver BC
RSVP: Please rsvp below.
Speaker: Professor Andrew Warfield, Associate Professor, UBC Department of Computer Science; Co-Founder & CTO, Coho Data
Tiltle: Keeping up with the architects: Software evolution for dense datacenters
Abstract: 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, I'll quickly overview a few interesting hardware trends and their consequences for software. I will summarize my own experiences in developing a commercial rack-scale software-based storage system as an example of a subset of this space. Finally, I'll step back and point to (and probably also rant about) 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.