Computer Science Seminar: Towards Data-Driven Autonomics in Exascale Data 
Centers

Monday, September, 21, 2015 10:30am
ENGR 4201

Ozalp Babaoglu (University of Bologna)

Abstract

Continued reliance on human operators for managing data centers is a major 
impediment for them from ever reaching extreme dimensions. In this talk, I will 
outline some new ideas towards data-driven autonomics that can enable the 
exascale data centers of the future. In my vision, large computer systems in 
general, and data centers in particular, will ultimately be managed using 
predictive computational and executable models obtained through data-science 
tools, and at that point, the intervention of humans will be limited to setting 
high-level goals and policies rather than performing "nuts-and-bolts?h" 
operations. I believe that we are at a technological inflection point with the 
confluence of ideas from distributed systems, data science, statistical machine 
learning, computational modeling, network science and complexity science such 
that an interdisciplinary effort will be able to fit together all pieces of 
this puzzle and solve the grand challenge. The breakthrough I envision is an 
operator-less exascale data center where management and control are based on 
predictive holistic models. These models will include not only the computer 
system as such, but also its geographical, physical and socio-political 
environment. This development will be a game changer in how large data centers 
are managed and controlled, enabling scales and efficiencies that are currently 
unimaginable.

Speaker's Bio

Ozalp Babaoglu is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bologna. 
He received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley. 
Babaoglu's virtual memory extensions to AT&T Unix as a graduate student at UC 
Berkeley became the basis for a long line of BSD Unix distributions. He is the 
recipient of 1982 Sakrison Memorial Award, 1989 UNIX International Recognition 
Award and 1993 USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award for his 
contributions to the Unix system community and to Open Industry Standards. 
Before moving to Bologna in 1988, Babaoglu was an Associate Professor in the 
Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he conducted 
research on distributed systems and fault-tolerance. Since moving to Italy, he 
has been active in numerous European research projects in distributed computing 
and complex systems including BROADCAST, CABERNET, ADAPT and DELIS. In 2001 he 
co-founded the Bertinoro international center for informatics (BiCi). Since its 
inception, this "Italian Dagstuhl" has organized more than 150 prestigious 
scientific meetings/schools and has had thousands of young researchers from all 
over the world pass through its doors. In 2002 Babaoglu was made a Fellow of 
the ACM for his "contributions to fault-tolerant distributed computing, BSD 
Unix, and for leadership in the European distributed systems community". In 
2007, he co-founded the IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and 
Self-Organizing Systems (SASO) conference series and has been a member of its 
Steering Committee since inception and has served as co-general chair for the 
2007 and 2013 editions. Since 2013, he has been on the Selection Committee for 
the ACM Heidelberg Laureate Forum which brings together young researchers in 
Computer Science and Mathematics with Abel, Fields and Turing Laureates. He 
currently serves on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and 
Adaptive Systems. Previously, he served for two decades on the editorial boards 
of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems and Springer-Verlag Distributed 
Computing.