DSG Seminar Series • Specialization, Disaggregation and Streaming: The New Frontiers for Data Processing

Please note: This seminar will take place online.

Gustavo Alonso, Professor
Department of Computer Science, ETH Zürich

Computing platforms are evolving rapidly along many dimensions but specialization, disaggregation, and streaming are at the cornerstone of these developments. These changes are being driven mostly by LLM/AI/ML applications but also arise from the need to make cloud platforms more efficient. From a practical perspective, the result we see today is a deluge of possible configurations and deployment options, most of them too new to have a precise idea of their performance implications and lacking proper support in the form of tools and platforms that can manage the underlying diversity. The growing heterogeneity is opening up many opportunities but also raising significant challenges.

In the talk I will describe the trend towards specialization and disaggregation at all layers of the architecture, provide several examples from our own research, and bring up the often forgotten issue of how to program widely heterogeneous systems.

Bio: Gustavo Alonso is a professor in the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich where he is a member of the Systems Group. His research interests include data management, distributed systems, cloud computing architecture, and hardware acceleration through reconfigurable computing.

Gustavo has received 4 Test-of-Time Awards for his research in databases, software runtimes, middleware, and mobile computing. He is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Computer Science of UC Santa Barbara, and has received the Lifetime Achievements Award from the European Chapter of ACM SIGOPS (EuroSys).

To attend this DSG Seminar Series on Zoom, please go to https://uwaterloo.zoom.us/j/99303225356.