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SUMMARY:EE Distinguished Speakers Seminar Series of IEL-EPFL: How the clou
 d is driving software and hardware specialization - a use case from the ai
 rline industry
DTSTART:20200306T131500
DTEND:20200306T143000
DTSTAMP:20260916T034727Z
UID:84316f701ce5df85a5c163527d1e08378ca6e8adb4eb378c38c4bc90
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Gustavo Alonso\, ETH Zürich\, Switzerland\nAbstract:\nI
 ncreasingly demanding workloads and the prevalence of data center and clou
 d computing as the primary computing platforms open up many opportunities 
 for specialization at all levels of the stack\, from hardware to software.
  In this talk\, I will explain this trend as well as discuss the technolog
 y and economic reasons for it. We will then explore some of the challenges
  associated to modern search engines in terms of scalability\, efficiency\
 , and latency requirements. Using two use cases from the airline industry 
 developed together with Amadeus (decision tree ensembles and rule engines)
 \, I will show how we have been able to develop proof-of-concept solutions
  based on FPGAs that represent orders of magnitude improvements along seve
 ral dimensions (performance\, efficiency\, cost) over the state of the art
 . The system has been tested on premises using different FPGA products and
  also on the cloud (Amazon's F1 instances)\, showing where the strengths o
 f the approach lie and where more could be invested to improve performance
 .  Spectacular as the results are\, they also shed light on important ar
 chitectural questions regarding specialization and hardware acceleration: 
 unified memory spaces\, cache coherency\, connectivity\, and overall manag
 ement. I will go over these questions and discuss several of our lines of 
 research exploring this promising space.   \n\nShort Bio: \nGustavo Alo
 nso is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zürich where he is a member
  of the Systems Group (www.systems.ethz.ch) and the Head of the Institute 
 for Computing Platforms. He has a degree in electrical engineering from th
 e Madrid Technical University as well as a M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Compu
 ter Science from UC Santa Barbara. Gustavo's research interests encompass 
 almost all aspects of systems\, from design to run time. He works on distr
 ibuted systems\, data processing\, and system aspects of programming langu
 ages. Most of his research these days is related to data processing on dat
 a centers and the cloud as well as hardware acceleration using FPGAs. Gust
 avo has received numerous awards for his work\, including four Test-of-Tim
 e awards for contributions to databases\, programming languages\, mobile c
 omputing\, and systems. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE as well 
 as a Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Computer Science of UC San
 ta Barbara.
LOCATION:ELA 2 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==ELA%202
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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