Wednesday 9th February, 10:00-11:00
Keynote Speaker: Yannis Ioannidis, University of Athens
Title: Schedule Optimization for Data Processing Flows on the Cloud
Abstract
Scheduling data processing workflows (dataflows) on the cloud is a very complex and challenging task. It is essentially an optimization problem, very similar to query optimization, that is characteristically different from traditional problems in two aspects. First, its space of alternative schedules is very rich, due to various optimization opportunities that cloud computing offers. Second, its optimization criterion is at least two-dimensional, with the monetary cost of using the cloud being at least as important as the query response time. In this presentation, we study the scheduling of dataflows that involve arbitrary data processing operators in the context of three different problems: 1) minimize completion time given a fixed budget, 2) minimize monetary cost given a time limit, and 3) find trade-offs between time and monetary cost without constraints given a-priori. We formulate the problems and present an approximate optimization framework to address them that makes use of resource elasticity in the cloud. To investigate the effectiveness of our approach, we incorporate the devised framework into a prototype system for dataflow evaluation and instantiate it with several greedy, probabilistic, and exhaustive search algorithms.
Finally, we present the results of several experiments that we have conducted with the prototype elastic optimizer on numerous scientific and synthetic dataflows and we identify the advantages and disadvantages of the various search algorithms. The overall results are quite promising and indicate the effectiveness of our approach. This is joint work with Herald Kllapi, Eva Sitaridi, and Manolis Tsangaris.
Short CVYannis Ioannidis is currently a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. He received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1982, his MSc degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1983, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. He was on the faculty of the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he became a Professor before leaving in 1999. His research interests include database and information systems, electronic infrastructures, digital libraries, personalization, scientific systems, and human-computer interaction, topics on which he has published over one hundred articles in leading journals and conferences and holds three patents. Dr. Ioannidis is an ACM and IEEE Fellow and has received the Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) award in 1991, the 2003 VLDB "10-Year Best Paper Award", the 2006 nation-wide "Xanthopoulos-Pnevmatikos Award for Outstanding Academic Teaching" in Greece, and several other teaching awards. He has been a program (co-)chair of several conferences and a (co-)principal investigator in over thirty research projects funded by various government agencies (Europe, Greece, USA) or private industry. Dr. Ioannidis currently serves a 4-year term as the ACM SIGMOD Chair (following a 4-year term as Vice-Chair) and is or has been a member of several other executive bodies of professional organizations (VLDB Endowment, IEEE TCDE Executive Committee, EDBT Endowment) and Scientific Advisory Boards (Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Greek National Science & Technology Council, Information Technology advisor to the Greek Minister of Health).
Thursday 10th February, 14:30-15:30
Keynote Speaker: Andreas Pitsillides, University Of Cyprus
Title: The Web of Things: Present state and future challenges
Abstract
Sensors and wireless sensor networks are being deployed around the world, capable of measuring with high precision the local environmental conditions. Their sensing functionality potentially can enable context-aware ubiquitous platforms, middleware and applications to proliferate. Residences can be transformed into smart homes, incorporating embedded sensors and ubiquitous technology. In recent years, new technologies like short-range wireless communications and real-time localization are slowly becoming common, allowing the Internet to penetrate into the real world of physical objects.
Inspired from embedded Internet connectivity, the Web of Things (WoT) is about reusing well-accepted and understood Web principles to interconnect the quickly expanding ecosystem of embedded devices, built into everyday smart things. In this talk, we identify contributions that have enabled the vision of Web-enabling smart objects. We will present promising applications of the WoT in domains such as smart homes, urban environments, logistics and the forthcoming smart grid of electricity. We will also discuss and identify challenges in this domain, and how the WoT can constitute a driver towards an energy-efficient, sustainable future.
Short CVAndreas is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, and heads the Networks Research Laboratory (NetRL, http://www.NetRL.cs.ucy.ac.cy). His research interests include fixed and wireless Networks (ad-hock and sensor networks, VANETS, WLANs&WMANs, UMTS Third Generation mobile networks and beyond, 4G), flow and congestion control, resource allocation and radio resource management, and Internet technologies and their application in Mobile e-Services, e.g. in Tele-Healthcare, and the Web of Things. He has a particular interest in adapting tools from various fields of applied mathematics such as adaptive non-linear control theory, computational intelligence, and recently nature inspired techniques, to solve problems in communication networks. Andreas has published well over 200 research papers and book chapters, he is the co-editor with Petros Ioannou of the book on Modelling and Control of Complex Systems (CRC, 2007), participated in over 30 European Commission and locally funded research projects with over 4 million Euro as principal or co-principal investigator, presented invited lectures at major research organisations and universities, has given short courses at international conferences and short courses to industry. Andreas serves/served on the executive committees of major conferences, as e.g. ICT 2011, INFOCOM 2001, 2002, 2003, WiOpt 2007, ISYC 2006, MCCS 2005, and ICT 1998. He is a member of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Technical Committee TC 1.5 on Networked Systems and TC 7.3 on Transportation Systems, and of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) working group WG 6.3: Performance of Communications Systems. Andreas is also a member of the Editorial Board of Computer Networks (COMNET) Journal and the International Journal of Handheld Computing Research (IJHCR).
Friday 11th February, 14:30-15:30
Keynote Speaker: Franck Cappello, INRIA and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Title: HPC at Exascale: Scenarios, Software challenges and Research opportunities",
Abstract
The next frontier of the HPC community is Exascale computing. Studies have started at several key players of HPC. These studies reveal potential scenarios for hardware and software raising many open questions. The community has launched several road mapping initiatives, research laboratories, academic/military funding programs to organize research and development toward solving critical issues with realistic solutions. As the community moves forward and candidate architectures get more defined, the technical issues on software and applications get more challenging. In this talk, I will present where the community is in this endeavor to Exascale computing, what are the main scenarios envisioned for Exascale architectures, what are the consequences on software. We will in particular focus on fault tolerance since this problem is identified as one of the main issues to solve before Exascale and is linked to two other critical issues that are scalability&locality and the reduction of energy consumption.
Short CVFranck Cappello holds a Senior Researcher position at INRIA and a visiting research professor position at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the co-director with Prof. Marc Snir of the INRIA-Illinois Joint-Laboratory on PetaScale Computing (http://jointlab.ncsa.illinois.edu/) developing joint software research in the context of the BlueWaters project (http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/). He is member of the executive committee of IESP (International Exascale Software Project: http://www.exascale.org) and chair of the "system software ecosystem" for EESI (European Exascale Software Initiative: http://www.eesi-project.eu/). He has been involved in many Exascale preparation workshops. Before 2009, he initiated and led the Grid5000 project, a nationwide computer science platform for research in large scale distributed systems used by hundreds of researchers. He is editorial board member of the international Journal on Grid Computing, Journal of Grid and Utility Computing and Journal of Cluster Computing. He is a steering committee member of IEEE HiPC and IEEE/ACM CCGRID, Technical paper co-chair of SC2011 and was the Program chair of HiPC 2010, IEEE NCA 2010, Program co-Chair of IEEE CCGRID'2009 and General Chair of IEEE HPDC'2006.