ICSA Colloquium Talk - 18/05/2021

Title: The Fractal Data Center: Open Challenges Across the Software and Hardware Stack Abstract: In their quest for generality and cost-efficiency, public cloud data centers have become a key tool for computing, where the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and hardware disaggregation models are centerpieces for building flexible and cost-efficient compute and storage substrates. Composing services and resources using these models is thus central to the data center as we understand it today. In this talk, I will focus on how this model of composition is slowly eating our cycles away, magnifying and entrenching structural inefficiencies across the software and hardware stack. To end on a happier note, I will also present some ideas that can help us eliminate these efficiencies by strategically reorganizing the role of composition and security across the data center stack, and will briefly present some results on an early prototype that embodies some of these ideas. Bio: Lluís Vilanova is a Lecturer in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, which he joined after a post-doctoral position at the Technion's Electrical Engineering department, and a joint PhD degree at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Lluís works in and around the intersection between computer architecture, systems and security, with research on areas such as virtualization, OS design, hardware support for security, or predictive resource management.