April 11 - CS Alum Ike Nassi presents Advances in Large Scale Shared Memory Multiprocessors

 

CS Alum and founder of TidalScale, Ike Nassi, will present on April 11 at 1:45p in New Computer Science, Room 120. Details of his talk and his bio are presented below.  CSE 600 students will receive credit for attending. 

Advances in Large Scale Shared Memory Multiprocessors

Abstract: This talk answers serious questions from the Big Data community. Can I run my application in memory over my entire data set rather than distributing it over a cluster?  Will the solution scale as my problem size increases or must I rewrite my application? Is there a viable alternative to buying a supercomputer? These questions arise throughout analytics, data mining, data bases, simulation, and biomedical engineering, including computational genomics.

The option to “Scale Up” to ever larger servers or supercomputers is often too expensive, so the industry has evolved to a “Scale Out” approach involving newer technologies to help users slice their problems into pieces small enough to run on more affordable servers. Users scale out by simply adding more servers. But, there are often significant operational and development costs to do this. One has to write new (distributed) software, which is time consuming and susceptible to bugs.  Also, as the schemas change, one may have to incur additional data migration expenses of re-partitioning or (re-sharding) data. 

We have developed a radically different approach.  We’ve developed a hyperkernel that offers the best of both worlds: it is both user-friendly like Scale Up and grows at linear cost like Scale Out. Running on our hypervisor is like buying a new, larger computer, but without spending huge amounts of money.  The TidalScale hyperkernel combines multiple servers into a single large scalable virtual supercomputer that can run unmodified guest operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows, allowing many processors to operate on what appears to be a large, strongly coherent shared memory.  

Brief Bio: Dr. Ike Nassi is an adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz, and the founder of TidalScale, a new company in stealth mode.  He is also an independent technology consultant and investor, and has recently joined the Advisory Board of SkyEra. Before his retirement, he was an Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist at SAP where his group explored advanced new enterprise technologies and applications for use in multinational corporate environments. He started SAP's Global Business Incubator and operated the SAP Sponsored Academic Research Program, sponsoring over 100 research projects in five years. Dr. Nassi holds an M.S. and PhD in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematics from the Stony Brook University and in 2008 completed a global leadership development program at INSEAD.