The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

This series of talks focuses on the research and education conducted by the PDS group in recent years, on topics such as grid and cloud computing, systems for massively multiplayer online games, big data, and gamification of higher education.

Our research focuses on the modeling, the design, the implementation, and the analysis of parallel and distributed systems and algorithms. Our research is fundamental in that we aim to develop and evaluate generic methods and techniques, and application-driven in that the research is motivated by application areas. Most of our research is experimental: we try to build prototypes of systems, preferably used in the real world, to demonstrate the quality of the proposed solutions. Our education focuses on the design and delivery of higher education units, such as B.Sc. and M.Sc.-level courses, and on the design of novel teaching techniques for a new, multi-cultural generation of students. We validate our teaching techniques experimentally, by gradually deploying them in the classroom.

The research part of our talks focuses on:
- New approaches for performance evaluation and benchmarking of IaaS clouds, in the lecture "IaaS Cloud Benchmarking: Approaches, Challenges, and Experience"
- Building distributed systems to support online games with massive player counts, in the lecture "Massivizing Social Games: Distributed Computing Challenges and High Quality Time"
- Exploring scheduling in IaaS clouds, in the lecture "Scheduling in IaaS Cloud Computing Environments: Anything New?"
- An empirical exploration of big data processing, in the lecture "A TU Delft Perspective on Big Data: Machine-Level Graph Processing and Time-Based Data Analytics"
The education part of our talks focuses on:
- Gamification as a technique for higher education, in the lecture "Gamification: Playful Teaching for Generation-X/-Y/-Z/…"

Bio
Alexandru Iosup is currently an Assistant Professor with the Parallel and Distributed Systems Group at TU Delft. He has received in 2009 his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), the Netherlands. He was a visiting scholar at U. Wisconsin-Madison, U. Innsbruck, and U. California-Berkeley in the summers of 2006, 2008, and 2010, respectively. In 2011, Dr. Iosup has received a Veni grant (the Dutch equivalent of the US NSF CAREER.) He is the author of over 50 refereed scientific publications and have received several awards and distinctions, including best paper awards at IEEE CCGrid 2010, Euro-Par 2009, and IEEE P2P 2006. He has co-founded the Grid Workloads Archive; and the Peer-to-Peer, the Game, and the Failure Trace Archives, all of which provide open access to workload and resource operation traces from large-scale distributed computing environments. His long-term research interests are in the area of distributed computing systems and their applications (keywords: cloud computing, grid computing, peer-to-peer systems, scientific computing, massively multiplayer online games, scheduling, scalability, reliability, performance evaluation, workload characterization).

The lectures will be given in English.