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Farewell to Servers: Hardware, Software, and Network Approaches towards Datacenter Resource Disaggregation; Yiying Zhang

Event Details

Date
Thursday, March 14, 2019
Time
1 p.m.
Location
Description

Datacenters have been using the "monolithic" server model for decades, where each server has a motherboard that hosts a set of hardware devices like CPU and DRAM. This monolithic architecture is easy to deploy but cannot offer efficient resource packing, hardware elasticity, failure isolation, or good support for heterogeneity. I believe that recent and future hardware and software application trends call for a rethinking of the long-standing server-centric model. My solution is to "disaggregate" monolithic servers into distributed, network-attached hardware components that can each manage its own resource and can fail independently. Datacenters have successfully evolved from physical (DC-1.0) to virtual (DC-2.0). I believe that now is the time for datacenters to evolve further into a disaggregated one (DC-3.0).

In this talk, I will talk about my research vision and my lab’s efforts in building the next-generation disaggregated datacenters at system software, hardware, and network levels. Specifically, I will focus on two systems: LegoOS, a new distributed operating system designed and built from scratch for managing disaggregated resource devices, and LegoFPGA, an efficient, flexible, and easy-to-use FPGA-based hardware solution designed for heterogeneous, programmable, and disaggregated datacenters. LegoOS and LegoFPGA together largely improve performance per dollar over the current datacenter model of running Linux on monolithic servers.

Bio: Yiying Zhang is an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Her research interests span operating systems, distributed systems, computer architecture, and datacenter networking. She also works on the intersection of systems and programming language, security, and AI/ML. She won an OSDI best paper award in 2018 and an NSF CAREER award in 2019. Her work has also gained various industry and academia attentions. Yiying received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the supervision of Andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Diego before joining Purdue.

Cost
Free

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