S E M I N A R: Cognified Distributed Computing
Prof. Özalp Babaoğlu
University of Bologna, Italy
Cognification — the act of transforming ordinary objects or processes into their intelligent counterparts through Data Science and Artificial Intelligence — is a disruptive technology that has been revolutionizing disparate fields ranging from corporate law to medical diagnosis. Easy access to massive data sets, data analytics tools and High-Performance Computing (HPC) have been fueling this revolution. In many ways, cognification is similar to the electrification revolution that took place more than a century ago when electricity became a ubiquitous commodity that could be accessed with ease from anywhere in order to transform mechanical processes into their electrical counterparts. In this talk, I will consider two particular forms of distributed computing — Data Centers and HPC systems — and argue that they are ripe for cognification of their entire ecosystem, ranging from top-level applications down to low-level resource and power management services. I will present my vision for what Cognified Distributed Computing might look like and outline some of the challenges that need to be addressed and new technologies that need to be developed in order to make it a reality. In particular, I will examine the role cognification can play in tackling power consumption, resiliency and management problems in these systems and describe intelligent software-based solutions to these problems powered by on-line predictive models built from streamed real-time data. While the problem and our solutions are cast in the context of large Data Centers and HPC systems, I believe that our approach is applicable to distributed computing in general and the traditional systems research agenda has much to gain by crossing discipline boundaries to include ideas and techniques from Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.
Bio: Özalp Babaoğlu is Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna. He received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley. Babaoglu’s virtual memory extensions to AT&T Unix as a graduate student at UC Berkeley became the basis for a long line of “BSD Unix” distributions. He is the recipient of 1982 Sakrison Memorial Award, 1989 UNIX International Recognition Award and 1993 USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the Unix system community and to Open Industry Standards. Before moving to Bologna in 1988, Babaoglu was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he conducted research on distributed systems and fault-tolerance. Since moving to Italy, he has been active in numerous European research projects in distributed computing and complex systems including BROADCAST, CABERNET, ADAPT and DELIS. In 2001 he co-founded the Bertinoro international center for informatics (BiCi). Since its inception, this “Italian Dagstuhl” has organized more than 180 prestigious scientific meetings/schools and has had thousands of young researchers from all over the world pass through its doors. In 2002 Babaoglu was made a Fellow of the ACM for his “contributions to fault-tolerant distributed computing, BSD Unix, and for leadership in the European distributed systems community”. From 2002 to 2005 he was the coordinator of the European Union Framework Five project BISON that resulted in seminal work on biology-inspired techniques applied to dynamic networks and on gossip-based distributed algorithms. In 2007, he co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO) conference series and has been a member of its Steering Committee since inception and has served as co-general chair for the 2007 and 2013 editions. Since 2013, he has been on the Selection Committee for the ACM Heidelberg Laureate Forum, which brings together young researchers in Computer Science and Mathematics with Abel, Fields and Turing Laureates. He currently serves on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems. Previously, he served for two decades on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and Springer-Verlag Distributed Computing.
DATE: 02 November 2018, Friday @ 13:40
PLACE: EA-409