The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Big data is revolutionizing the way we live, work, and socialize. This revolution is powered by datacenters built with commodity hardware technologies that are now running out of steam. In this talk, I will outline the disruptive challenges facing future computing systems and will argue for specializing server hardware as the only way forward. The principal challenge for specialization lies in providing common-case efficiency benefits without losing the generality necessary to accommodate both legacy and future software needs in cloud infrastructures. As a step toward meeting this challenge, I will present our latest work on specializing server cores to meet both single-thread performance demands and maximize throughput under QoS constraints for collocated workloads.

Bio:
Boris Grot is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His research seeks to address efficiency bottlenecks and capability shortcomings of processing platforms for big data. He is a MICRO Hall of Fame inductee and a recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award. Grot received his PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin and spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Parallel Systems Architecture Lab at EPFL.