Skip to content Skip to navigation
Computer Science Department Colloquium
12/2/2014 11:00 am
CoRE A(Room 301)

Disaggregated Systems

Hubertus Franke, IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Faculty Host: Manish Parashar

Abstract

Information-processing applications and domains require a rethinking of how IT is to be delivered as solutions and services, meeting a variety of requirements that include performance, resilience, security, and agility. Cloud-computing platforms are becoming one of the preferred deployment platforms for both traditional applications and a new generation of mobile, social, and analytics applications. Changes are evident at all layers of the platform stack. At the infrastructure level, the network, compute, and storage are becoming more software defined, i.e., the control layer and operational layers are separating, allowing the control to often be executed on standard servers and thus enabling a larger variety of offerings. For instance, software defined networking and software defined storage are currently undergoing this transition. As the underlying environment becomes more software defined and programmable, applications will become progressively easier to develop, deploy, optimize, and manage. This, in turn, will foster innovation in the solutions, tooling, and runtime domains, leading to entirely new ecosystems that will enable capturing workload topologies and characteristics, and that will enable compiling them onto an infrastructure that is assembled from the software defined components for optimal outcomes. The emergence of flat networks as the back bone of the data center allows this rethinking on how systems will be composed. Rather then assembling racks of servers, the infrastructure will be composed of resource pools ( storage, accelerators, memory nodes) that are interconnected through the high speed low latency flat networks. Network latencies and bandwidth approach bus attached I/O performance and therefore allow for resource disaggregation and subsequent re-aggregation based on the specific resource requirements of individual workloads. The programmable nature of this process enables a highly agile, flexible and consequently robust environment. In this talk, we will discuss the key ingredients of this disruptive trend of software defined environments and disaggregated system and illustrate their potential benefits.

Dr. Franke will be available to meet with Rutgers faculty and students during the day. If you would like to meet with Dr. Franke please contact Dr. Javier Diaz-Montes at javidiaz@rdi2.rutgers.edu.

Bio

Hubertus Franke IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (frankeh@us.ibm.com). Dr. Franke is a Distinguished Research Staff Member and Senior Manager for Software Defined Infrastructures at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He received a Diplom degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1987, and a M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1989 and 1992, respectively.  He subsequently joined IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he worked on the IBM SP1/2 messaging, scalable operating systems, multi-core architectures, scalable applications, and cloud platforms. He received several IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards for his work. He is an author or coauthor of more than 35 patents and over 110 technical papers. He is an IBM Master Inventor, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, an Adjunct Professor for Computer Science at NYU teaching Operating Systems and he serves on the Rutger's ECE Advisory Board since 2011.