ICSA Colloquium Talk - 19/11/2020

Title:  Active Heterogeneous Hardware and its Impact on System Design

Abstract: The rise of hardware heterogeneity and the potential to offload compute closer to data (e.g., storage and memory) or to push operations down to where data moves (e.g., on the networks or acceleration within the chip) opens both exciting opportunities and significant challenges for system software like databases that want to make efficient use of future hardware. One of the main questions is then, who absorbs that complexity especially as we move to the "noisy" cloud? In my talk, I will argue that addressing such a challenge requires an effort that is beyond what can be typically done within a single layer of the system stack. My proposal calls for a holistic approach by opening up the interfaces and customizing the system stack for modern data processing workloads. 

Bio: Jana Giceva is an assistant professor in the Chair for Database Systems at TU Munich. Her research interests are in systems support for data science and Big Data to enable efficient use of modern and future hardware. Her research spans across multiple system sub-field: data processing layer, operating systems and hardware accelerators for data processing.

She got her Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2017, where she was awarded an ETH medal for outstanding PhD dissertation. From 2017 to 2019 she was a Lecturer in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. She is a recipient of the VMware Early Career Faculty Award in 2019 and a Google PhD Fellowship in 2014.