A New System Architecture For Green Enterprise Computing
Maria Kazandjieva - Stanford University
09/05/2013
Computing systems account for at least 13% of the electricity use of office buildings. This translates to about 2% of the electricity consumption of the entire US. (The equivalent of the State of New Jersey!) As computing becomes pervasive, making these systems more efficient is an opportunity to make a positive change. First, I will argue that the current understanding of energy consumption in office buildings is too limited and coarse-grained. Without better visibility into how electricity is spent and how much of it is wasted, we cannot start thinking about how to reduce its use. I will present Powernet, a multi-year power and utilization study of the compute infrastructure in Gates. I will then use the Powernet data to propose a novel system architecture for office computing, Anyware, that replaces desktops while retaining performance. Anyware’s hybrid design splits workload execution between a local low-power client device and a virtual machine (VM) on a backend server. Anyware reduces the energy cost of computing by 70%--80% because the client has power draw comparable to that of a thin client or a laptop (15 to 20 watts) while the server can host multiple user VMs. Fast I/O, the availability of network resources in a LAN environment, and the increased CPU and memory on the server mean that users can get comparable performance at the fraction of the energy cost. Anyware demonstrates that with a new computing architecture, it is possible to have the best of two worlds: desktop performance at the energy costs of thin clients.
It Is All About The Process
Michel Davidoff - CSU Chancellor’s Office
09/12/2013
This talk will focus on the process that led the CSU to change its networking vendor and save the CSU tens of millions of dollars. This story was covered by all the major networking magazines and created quite a stir within the industry. I will talk about the process to write the RFP, both technical and financial as well as the selection process.
Game Theoretic Aspects In All Optical Networks
Katerina Potika - San Jose State University
09/19/2013
This talk is about modeling decentralized wavelength assignment problems in all-optical networks as games. In this model, we will answer questions related to the existence, computation of, and convergence to a pure Nash equilibrium (a stable state in which no user/player has incentive to change). We provide bounds for the loss that is encountered due to the lack of a centralized control, aka Price of Anarchy, when every selfish player seeks to reduce her individual cost.
Logicblox: Platform And Language
Todd J. Green - University of California, Davis
09/26/2013
The modern enterprise software stack---a collection of applications supporting bookkeeping, analytics, planning, and forecasting for enterprise data---is in danger of collapsing under its own weight. The task of building and maintaining enterprise software is tedious and laborious; applications are cumbersome for end-users; and adapting to new computing hardware and infrastructures is difficult. We believe that much of the complexity in today’s architecture is accidental, rather than inherent. This tutorial provides an overview of the LogicBlox platform, an ambitious redesign of the enterprise software stack centered around a unified declarative programming model, based on an extended version of Datalog.
Models Of Models--Eleven Examples Of Realizing Computational Models From Babbage's Analytical Engine To Off-The-Wall Turing Machines
Benjamin Wells - University of San Francisco
10/03/2013
For more than three decades, students, friends, acquaintances, and I have struggled to bring a variety of models of computation into a usable form for the classroom, written exposition, and mathematical proof. This has involved numerous software, notational, and conceptual systems. This talk will introduce you to hardware you never heard of, software you would not dream of, and schemes you just might think of.