Colloquium Series

Contacts: Vasia Kalavri, Assistant Professor, Computer Science,

John Liagouris, Assistant Professor, Computer Science

 

Upcoming Events in the Colloquium Series

January 26: Matthew Miller, Conversation with Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller
  • Location: Center for Computing & Data Sciences, 665 Commonwealth Ave, Room 1646 (16th floor)

 

This list includes full abstracts of past Colloquium Series events.

  • Colloquium: Pause for democracy: Leaving open source storage to help Americans vote in 2020

    Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium Sage Weil Ceph Project Lead; Sr Distinguished Engineer, Red Hat Pause for democracy: Leaving open source storage to help Americans vote in 2020 Abstract In 2020 I took a leave of absence to work on democracy and voting related efforts with VoteAmerica, a national get-out-the-vote organization with a focus on voter registration, voter turnout, and voter protection.  This was a huge departure from my usual role at Red Hat leading Ceph, an open source distributed storage project, both in terms of the technical work and the underlying motivation and purpose.    This talk will cover a mix of... [ More ]

  • Colloquium: Open Technology and Unlock Human Potential

    Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium Jonathan Bryce Executive Director, Open Infrastructure Foundation Open Technology and Unlock Human Potential Abstract Throughout human history, a conflict between closed innovation and open sharing has tugged at the progress made possible by technological advancement. When I create something new, do I control the benefits and retain the value for myself, or do I share the advancement broadly and let others move it forward while risking a lower return for myself? I imagine these questions have been asked every day for millennia by inventors and scientists, military leaders and governments, entrepreneurs and CEOs. We now live in a hyper-connected... [ More ]

  • Colloquium: The Platform Of The Future: What Is An Open Hybrid Cloud And What Does It Mean For Open Source

    Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium Hugh Brock Research Director, Red Hat The Platform Of The Future: What Is An Open Hybrid Cloud And What Does It Mean For Open Source Abstract One of the early developments in computing that made it an essential part of both scientific research and business operations was a basic abstraction layer that hid the grungy implementation details of the computing machine from the programmer trying to write an application to run on it. This layer developed to serve the computer industry's need to sell products to more than one customer: If you could design one computer, but sell it... [ More ]

  • Colloquium: Making AI faster, easier, and safer

    Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium Rania Khalaf Director of AI Platforms and Runtimes at IBM Research Making AI faster, easier, and safer Abstract Artificial intelligence is being infused into applications at an ever increasing rate. The proliferation of machine learning models in production has surfaced the need to bridge between the worlds of machine learning and software engineering in order to scale these deployments in a fast, safe and repeatable way. Finally, it is important to consider the applications that these models are deployed within and the context that brings to improving business outcomes effectively through ML. In this talk, we will talk... [ More ]

  • Colloquium: Open Cloud Testbed: Developing a Testbed for the Research Community Exploring Next-Generation Cloud Platforms

     Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium   Mike Zink Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Massachusetts Open Cloud Testbed: Developing a Testbed for the Research Community Exploring Next-Generation Cloud Platforms Abstract Cloud testbeds are critical for enabling research into new cloud technologies - research that requires experiments that potentially change the operation of the cloud itself. Several such testbeds have been created in the recent past (e.g., Chameleon, CloudLab, etc.) with the goal to support the CISE systems research community. It has been shown that these testbeds are very popular and heavily used by the research community. Testbed utilization often reaches 100%, especially... [ More ]

  • Colloquium: Software-Configured Compute Environments

    Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium Ulrich Drepper Engineer, Office of the CTO, Red Hat Software-Configured Compute Environments Abstract Hardware and software environments are designed as a compromise between many different requirements. This sacrifices performance, among other aspects, while at the same time the need for compute increases. Specialists can certainly create more optimized systems. The challenge is to automate this. To research these new systems we need hardware specialists to create re-configurable processors, compiler writers to deduce the best architecture from source code and generate configurations for hardware and OS, improved OSes to efficiently run that code. All that while preserving API and ideally ABI... [ More ]

  • Colloquium: Chameleon: New Capabilities for Experimental Computer Science

    Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium Kate Keahey Senior Fellow, Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Computer Scientist, Mathematics and Computer Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory Chameleon: New Capabilities for Experimental Computer Science Abstract Computer Science experimental testbeds allow investigators to explore a broad range of different state-of-the-art hardware options, assess scalability of their systems, and provide conditions that allow deep reconfigurability and isolation so that one user does not impact the experiments of another. An experimental testbed is also in a unique position to provide methods facilitating experiment analysis and crucially, improve repeatability and reproducibility of experiments both from the perspective of the... [ More ]

  • Colloquium: Networking as a First-Class Cloud Resource

     Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium Rodrigo Fonseca Associate Professor, Computer Science Department, Brown University Networking as a First-Class Cloud Resource Abstract Tenants in a cloud can specify, and are generally charged by, resources such as CPU, storage, and memory. There are dozens of different bundles of these resources tenants can choose from, and many different pricing schemes, including spot markets for left over resource. This is not the case for networking, however. Most of the time, networking is treated as basic infrastructure, and tenants, apart from connectivity, have very little to choose from in terms of network properties such as priorities, bandwidth, or... [ More ]

  • Colloquium: The Future of Enterprise Application Development in the Cloud

    Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium Mark Little Red Hat, Vice President of Engineering and JBoss Middleware CTO The Future of Enterprise Application Development in the Cloud Abstract Since the dawn of the cloud, developers have been inundated with a range of different recommended architectural approaches such as Web Services, REST or microservices, as well as just as many different frameworks or stacks, including AWS, Java EE, Spring Boot and now Eclipse MicroProfile. Throw in the explosion of programming languages, such as Golang and Swift and it's no wonder a developer today could be forgiven for being confused about where is the right place... [ More ]

  • Colloquium: Towards Tail Latency-Aware Caching in Large Web Services

    Red Hat Collaboratory at Boston University Colloquium Daniel S. Berger 2018 Mark Stehlik Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University Towards Tail Latency-Aware Caching in Large Web Services Abstract Tail latency is of great importance in user-facing web services. However, achieving low tail latency is challenging, because typical user requests result in multiple queries to a variety of complex backends (databases, recommender systems, ad systems, etc.), where the request is not complete until all of its queries have completed. In this talk we present our findings for the case of several large web services at Microsoft. We analyze production system request structures... [ More ]