Irfan
Ahmad,
Founder
and
CEO
CachePhysics
Caches in modern distributed and storage systems must be manually tuned and sized in response to changing application’s workload. A balance must be achieved between cost, performance and revenue loss from cache sizing mis-matches. However, caches are inherently nonlinear systems making this exercise equivalent to solving a maze in the dark.
In this talk, I will cover the key insights to the development of a class of efficient cache performance modeling and prediction techniques leading to the first published constant time and constant space algorithms. I will also discuss how a self-managing, auto-scaling cache can deliver gains in performance and observability. Finally, I will list some conjectures towards future areas of systems research.
Bio: Irfan Ahmad is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CachePhysics, a stealth-mode startup, which he cofounded in 2017.
Irfan was Founder and CTO of CloudPhysics for 5 years where he built the engineering team and helped bring to market the world’s first SaaS ITOA product.
Prior to CloudPhysics, Irfan was at VMware for 9 years, where he was R&D tech lead for the DRS team and co-inventor for flagship products, including Storage DRS and Storage I/O Control. Irfan worked extensively on interdisciplinary endeavors in memory, storage, CPU, and distributed resource management, and developed a special interest in research at the intersection of systems. Irfan also spent several years in performance analysis and optimization, both in systems software and OS kernels. Before VMware, Irfan worked on the Crusoe software microprocessor at Transmeta.
Irfan’s peer-reviewed research has been featured at ACM SOCC (best paper), USENIX ATC (best paper), USENIX FAST, and IEEE IISWC. Irfan was honored to have chaired HotStorage, HotCloud and VMware’s R&D Innovation Conference (RADIO). Irfan is a founding program co-chair of USENIX HotEdge, the first workshop on the topic of Edge Computing. Irfan serves on steering committees for USENIX HotEdge, USENIX HotStorage and USENIX HotCloud. Irfan has served on program committees for ATC ’18, FAST ’17, INFLOW ’16, HotCloud ’16, MSST ’16, HotStorage ’12, HotStorage ’10, SYSTOR ’10. Other academic service includes serving as a reviewer for the ACM Transactions on Storage.
Irfan is an inventor on more than 40 granted patents across memory management, page replacement, quality of service management, I/O scheduling and caching. Irfan earned his pink tie from the University of Waterloo.