Fine-grained resource disaggregation in next generation datacenters: Promise, challenges and current status of the journey
Dimitris Syrivelis, IBM Research Ireland
12-1pm 29th Nov 2019
Abstract
Cloud technology is indisputably driving the 4th industrial revolution. From the millions of applications, to the thousands of middleware and frameworks, down to a few hundreds of orchestration infrastructures, the increasingly heterogeneous workloads end up running on top of linux kernel, which in turn abstracts massive bare metal computing power enclosed in the few acres of the datacenter. And yes, the datacenters, being the backend force behind any activity on the cloud, are currently striving to cope reliably and effectively with the increasing workload demand. Apart from resource scheduling challenges, there is an immediate need for more flexible and higher performant vertical and horizontal scale of computing, storage and networking resources. Ongoing efforts are literally changing the computer organization as we know it in the context of the next generation datacenters. This talk will introduce technologies and an architecture that materializes software-defined resource disaggregation, which enables the dynamic composition of distributed hardware platforms and their abstraction at the operating system level. Insights on the various challenges that span all levels of the cloud infrastructure stack will be discussed and a live disaggregated memory demonstration will be presented
Short Bio
Dimitris is a member of the High perfromance system team at the IBM Research Lab in Dublin, Ireland. His work primarily targets vertical system support for next generation datacenters. Pushing forward the vision of Software Defined Infrastructures he is involved in projects that pursue solutions at the orchestration tools level, hypervisor level and reconfigurable hardware level. He is an IBM Power ecosystem expert, with significant contributions to research on processor and interconnect logic design, firmware and linux kernel for novel functionality enablements. Before joining IBM he was a senior researcher at CERTH/ITI for 5 years. He holds a Phd from the University of Thessaly since 2009. He received B.Sc. diploma in Computer Engineering from Technical University of Crete in 2003.