Data Processing and New Hardware

Speaker:        Professor Gustavo Alonso
                Department of Computer Science of
                ETH Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland

Title:          "Data Processing and New Hardware"

Date:           Thursday, 7 January 2016

Time:           11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:          Lecture Theater H (near lifts 27 & 28), HKUST

Abstract:

The proliferation of data sources and growth in the amounts of data
available for processing and analysis is often mentioned as one of the
driving trends in computer science. Such claims do not correlate well with
the implicit assumption that data processing will continue being performed
in conventional computer architectures. First, conventional architectures
are not there anymore, with computers becoming increasingly diverse and
heterogeneous. Second, society's attention has now shifted towards
efficient processing with an emphasis on reducing energy consumption and
over-provisioning. And third, modern hardware already allows significant
improvements over traditional data processing to be able to demonstrate
that specialized computer architectures are not only a good bet but an
unavoidable step in tackling the challenges of big data and data science.

In this talk I will illustrate the impact that new hardware is having and
can have on data processing by discussing recent results related to the
implementation of database operators on multicore, hardware accelerators,
and hybrid processors. I will also cover a number of ideas from computer
and data center architecture that are likely to radically change the way
we approach data processing.


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Biography:

Gustavo Alonso is a professor at the Department of Computer Science of ETH
Zurich (ETHZ) in Switzerland, where he is a member of the Systems Group.
Gustavo has a M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara.
Before joining ETH, he was at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His
research interests encompass almost all aspects of systems, from design to
run time. His applications of interest are distributed systems and
databases, with an emphasis on system architecture. Current research is
related to multi-core architectures, large clusters, FPGAs, and big data,
mainly working on adapting traditional system software (OS, database,
middleware) to modern hardware platforms. Gustavo is a Fellow of the ACM
and of the IEEE.