Global-Scale Applications Rely on Datacenters, Datacenters Rely on Scalable Computer Systems

Invited Talk, University of Texas in Austin, TX, USA

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Abstract

Google, Facebook, Amazon are all major tech companies that rely on scalable computer systems to survive. To cope with increasing computation demands and with the data deluge, we have already started to build complex hardware and software systems of systems (ecosystems), which a global user community accesses as cloud services. These users demand high performance or high throughput, and may switch at any time among the hundreds of service providers and technologies. This lecture focuses on interesting new challenges in the operation of the datacentres that form the infrastructure of cloud services, in particular on supporting the dynamic workloads of demanding users, on ensuring various forms of scalability, and also on efficient and fair operation. You will learn here vital skills for the industry: if we succeed in addressing these challenges, we may not only enable the advent of big science and engineering, and the almost complete automation of many large-scale processes, but also reduce the ecological footprint of datacentres and the entire ICT industry. Among these topics, we will also talk about how we won the IEEE Scale Challenge 2014.