EECS Colloquium
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
306 Soda Hall (HP Auditorium)
4:00 - 5:00 pm
Amin Vahdat
Fellow and Vice President of Engineering
Google

Amin Vahdat speaks on "Reinventing Computing: How necessity will transform next-generation infrastructure," 11/02/22
Abstract
The rise of scale-out, general-purpose, cluster computing coupled with sustained exponential growth in underlying hardware performance fueled planetary-scale services and connectivity that would have seemed unimaginable 20 years ago. However, the underlying trends fueling this transformation are ending just as we face unprecedented demand in machine learning, data processing, and sovereignty. In this talk, we will review both the history of this transformation and argue that the current computing landscape necessitates novel thinking and invention to fuel the next 1000x growth in capacity and capability, all while supporting a fundamentally different security and reliability posture to support modern societal infrastructure. In particular, we discuss how emerging approaches in i) computing specialization, ii) system rather than component optimization, and iii) new hardware organization, data hierarchies, and programming models are shaping the architectural paradigms for the next epoch of computing.
Biography
In the past, he was the SAIC Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego and the Director of UCSD’s Center for Networked Systems. Vahdat received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Computer Science, is an ACM Fellow and a past recipient of the NSF CAREER award, UC Berkeley Distinguished EECS Alumni Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award, and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award. Most recently, Amin was awarded the SIGCOMM lifetime achievement award for his contributions to data center and wide area networks.