[Colloq] Hiring Talk, Jeff Bigham, Wednesday, April 1

[Rachel Kalweit]

The College of Computer and Information Science presents a hiring talk by:

Andres Lagar-Cavilla
University of Toronto

Tuesday, April 14, 2009
1:30pm
366 West Village H

Title:
Flexible Computing with Virtual Machines

Abstract:
My research focuses on using virtualization to provide applications
with new dimensions of flexibility in their execution. Specifically, I
study flexibility along two axes: scale and location. Through scale
flexibility, applications executing in the cloud can use a VM fork
abstraction to instantaneously resize their computing footprint. VM
fork statefully and swiftly replicates a VM to multiple hosts in
parallel. VM fork provides well-known semantics and allow simple
programming of parallel applications, flash crowd handling,
load-balancing servers, etc. Through location flexibility, unmodified
applications written in any language can be transparently and
seamlessly migrated across the wide area to best match their resource
needs. When reading data, applications are moved closer to the
dataset; when going CPU-intensive, applications are moved to a remote
cloud or supercomputer; and when the user is engaged with an
interactive GUI, the application is moved to the user's site.