John Ousterhout: 2016 Plenary Session

3:00pm

Datacenter computing has driven many of the innovations in computer systems over the last decade. Until recently, most of the work on datacenters focused on scale (harnessing thousands of machines for a single application). Datacenters are now entering a second phase of development, driven by dramatic drops in the latency of network communication and storage access. Low-latency datacenters have the potential to enable radical new applications, but today's software stacks impose too much overhead to work well in low latency environments. This talk will discuss the latency trends and some research projects underway at Stanford to create a new software stack that allows applications to capitalize on low-latency datacenters.

John Ousterhout is the VMware Founders Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His current research focuses on storage systems for large-scale datacenter applications. Ousterhout's prior positions include 14 years in industry, where he founded two companies (Scriptics and Electric Cloud), preceded by 14 years as Professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley. He is the creator of the Tcl scripting language and is also well known for his work in distributed operating systems and file systems. Ousterhout received a BS degree in Physics from Yale University and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received numerous awards, including the ACM Software System Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.