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Attack of the Killer Microseconds

Series: Department Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Thomas F. Wenisch Director, Google, Mountain View

Date/Time: Mar 14 14:30:00

Location: CSA Seminar Hall (Room No. 254, First Floor)

Abstract:
Online Data Intensive (OLDI) applications, which process terabytes of data with sub-second latencies, are the cornerstone of modern internet services like web search and social media. However, it is challenging to build highly efficient OLDI applications due to a challenge that Luiz Barroso of Google named "Killer Microseconds". Today's CPUs are highly effective at hiding the nanosecond-scale latency of memory accesses and operating systems are highly effective at hiding the millisecond-scale latency of disks. However, modern high-performance networking and flash I/O frequently lead to situations where data are a few microseconds away. Neither hardware nor software offer effective mechanisms to hide these microsecond-scale stalls. There is a pressing need for systems researchers to find ways to hide microsecond-scale stalls that destroy application-level latency objectives.

Speaker Bio:
Thomas F. Wenisch is Director of Engineering in Network Infrastructure at Google, based in Google Madison. He leads a global team (including 21 software engineers in Google Bangalore) responsible for Google's production networking communication stacks, including its remote procedure call and OS-bypass networking stacks. He was previously Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and is the recipient of the 2021 ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award "for contributions to memory persistency and energy-efficient systems". His past research focused on computer architecture with particular emphasis on server and data center systems, memory persistency, multiprocessor and multicore systems, performance evaluation methodology, and medical imaging.

Host Faculty: Arkaprava Basu