News

• Stefan Roiser (CERN)
• Graeme A Stewart (CERN)
• Maria Girone (CERN)
• Michael Bussmann
• Benjamin Morgan (University of Warwick (GB))

Hardware acceleration for higher efficiency in data centers

• Gustavo Alonso (ETHZ)

Many applications dominating the computing landscape are data intensive: data analytics, machine learning, large language models, recommendation systems, etc. The amount of data processed by these systems is staggering and continues to grow at an exponential rate. While the use of more and more data has led to impressive progress in many areas, including storage and memory systems, it is often inefficiently managed. This is being addressed with increasing specialization at the hardware level. In this talk I will first comment on the environmental impact of current IT and the role of specialization. Then I will discuss why existing systems are inherently inefficient in data movement, resource utilization, and processing requirements. I will then present potential solutions that take advantage of the trends towards specialization and the large economies of scale of the cloud, suggesting along the way how to design data centric architectures that are more energy and resource efficient than what we have today. Gustavo Alonso is a professor in the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich where he is a member of the Systems Group (www.systems.ethz.ch) and the head of the Institute of Computing Platforms. He leads the AMD HACC (Heterogeneous Accelerated Compute Cluster) deployment at ETH (https://github.com/fpgasystems/hacc), with several hundred users worldwide, a research facility that supports exploring data center hardware-software co-design. His research interests include data management, cloud computing architecture, and building systems on modern hardware. Gustavo holds degrees in telecommunication from the Madrid Technical University and a MS and PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara. Previous to joining ETH, he was a research scientist at IBM Almaden in San Jose, California. Gustavo has received 4 Test-of-Time Awards for his research in databases, software runtimes, middleware, and mobile computing. He is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Computer Science of UC Santa Barbara, and has received the Lifetime Achievements Award from the European Chapter of ACM SIGOPS (EuroSys).