Ed Nightingale talk

Ed Nightingale from University of Michigan is at U of T to give a talk on "Improving the performance of highly reliable software systems". Abstract of his talk is below.

Commodity operating systems still retain the design principles developed when processor cycles were scarce and RAM was precious. These out-dated principles have led to performance/functionality trade-offs that are no longer needed or required; I have found that, far from impeding performance, features such as safety, consistency and energy-efficiency can often be added while improving performance over existing systems. I will describe my work developing Speculator, which provides facilities within the operating system kernel to track and propagate causal dependencies. Using Speculator, I will show that distributed and local file systems can provide strong consistency and safety guarantees without the poor performance these guarantees usually entail.

Ed Nightingale is Jason Flynn's PhD student, I remember reading a bunch of his papers during the pervasive computing research for the systems area.

He is talking about how to improve the performance of software systems and how reliability and correctness can still be ensured while improving the performance which is 8X slower than synchronous I/O. This is called external synchrony. It has to do with tracking causal dependencies in processes. He is also talking about when data is durable that you know it has been written properly to disk, as well as speculative execution. Speculative execution can dramatically improve the speed while maintaining consistency guarantees.

One of the research areas that I know Ed's work is in energy-aware adaptation for mobile computing systems. Since battery life is crucial in mobile computing devices, therefore one active area of research deals with how to maximize battery life on a computer. You already have several power saving modes on the computer, but Ed looks into whether there are other aggressive ways to even save more battery life on the computer, which when I read was very innovative. One of his papers is "Ghosts in the Machine", a similar resemblance to the Japanese animation movie "Ghosts in the Shell".

On Technorati: speculative execution, DCS talk