COLLOQUIUM Computer Science Department, Boston University Speaker: Professor Karsten Schwan Georgia Institute of Technology Date: Wednesday, September 28 Time: 3:00 Place: Room MCS 135, 111 Cummington Street (for directions, see www.cs.bu.edu/colloquium) Title: Autonomic Information Flows for Critical Information Systems Abstract: Critical Information Systems deliver to end users precisely the information they need, when they need it, and in the forms required. For such applications, our research seeks to improve `agility' in middleware to better match middleware functionality to dynamic application requirements. We design new methods and techniques for resource-awareness to coordinate application, middleware, and system behaviors to adjust their joint behaviors to current resource availabilities and application needs. Resulting online methods for runtime management are driven by application-level notions of utility. Finally, dynamic platform extension, including extending the network infrastructure, can substantially improve application and system performance. The approach of our research is to better integrate the different layers of abstraction in current computer and software systems. To demonstrate validity, agility, resource-awareness, runtime management, and dynamic platform extension are implemented with the high performance EVPath middleware, running across dynamically monitored Internet and/or cluster machines. Linux kernel extensions assist in dynamic performance manitoring and management, and experiments with extensible network subsystems are based on Intel's IXP network processors as representative communication cores in future multi-core architectures. Biography: Prof. Karsten Schwan directs the Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) at Georgia Tech. He is also a professor in the Systems Research Group of the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. His group conducts experimental research targeting high performance, real-time, and ubiquitous applications. Research topics include dynamic program adaptation; online program monitoring, tuning, and steering; task and message scheduling; basic mechanisms and policies for quality management in operating and communication systems; middleware; and software tools. This research is conducted on parallel, distributed, and embedded system platforms, in laboratories shared with end users and hardware developers. Host: Rich West