[Nets-seminars] UCL CS Distinguished Lecture: John Wilkes, Google, Tue 9 Dec, 2 PM

[Brad Karp]

Greetings, everyone.

It's my pleasure to announce a UCL CS Distinguished Lecture by John 
Wilkes, Principal Software Engineer at Google's Mountain View site, and 
a renowned figure in computer systems research.

After completing his PhD at Cambridge in 1984, John had a distinguished 
career spanning over 25 years at HP Labs, before joining Google in 2008. 
John has made important contributions to operating systems, storage 
systems, and distributed systems. John is an ACM Fellow, and in his 
prior position at HP Labs, was an HP Fellow.

You may have seen press coverage in Wired of his noteworthy 
contributions to distributed system design at Google:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/google-john-wilkes-new-hackers/

http://www.wired.com/2013/03/google-borg-twitter-mesos/all/

John will be speaking on his work designing distributed systems that 
manage Google's vast compute infrastructure. This talk should be of 
great interest to at least two constituencies: those who'd like to 
understand the unique challenges of cloud-based computing at a scale few 
have experience with; and those who'd like insight into what it's really 
like working as a systems researcher and hacker at Google in Mountain View.

All strongly encouraged to attend! Abstract and bio follow.

-Brad, bkarp at cs.ucl.ac.uk

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UCL CS Distinguished Lecture

Speaker:
    John Wilkes, Google
    http://www.e-wilkes.com/john/work.html

Title:
    Cluster Management at Google

Time and location:
    Tuesday 9th December, 2 PM
    Medawar G01 Lankester LT

Abstract:

Cluster management is the term that Google uses to describe how we 
control the computing infrastructure in our data centers that supports 
almost all of our external services. It includes allocating resources to 
different applications on our fleet of computers, looking after software 
installations and hardware, monitoring, and many other things. I'll 
present an overview of some of these systems and introduce Omega, the 
new cluster-manager tool we are building. Much of the talk will be about 
challenges that we're facing along the way, driven by the scale at which 
we operate, an acute awareness of failures, and the drive to provide 
ever-better service-levels while curbing complexity. We certainly don't 
have all the answers, but we do have some pretty impressive systems.

Bio:

John Wilkes has been at Google since 2008, where he is working on 
cluster management and infrastructure services. Before that, he spent a 
long time at HP Labs, becoming an HP and ACM Fellow in 2002.  He is 
interested in far too many aspects of distributed systems, but a 
recurring theme has been technologies that allow systems to manage 
themselves. In his spare time he continues, stubbornly, trying to learn 
how to blow glass.