Upcoming lecture by Raja Appuswamy, Postdoctoral Researcger in the DIAS lab at EPFL, on data management systems

Abstract

The design of data management systems has always been driven based on two aspects, namely, underlying hardware and applications requirements. The past few years have, however, witnessed dramatic changes in both these aspects.

On the hardware front, computer architecture is in a phase of constant change resulting in growing heterogeneity in the design of processors, memory, interconnects, and storage. With the wide-spread adoption of cloud computing, cloud providers have started deploying customized hardware in datacenters to balance price-power-performance trifecta, fueling this trend further. On the application front, many organizations increasingly require fast analytics on fresh transactional data to derive timely insights. The workload generated by the ensuing new breed of applications, also referred as “analytics 3.0” or “operational analytics”, is also heterogeneous in nature, as it blends transactional and analytical queries into a single stream.

In this talk, I will present two projects I started in the DIAS laboratory with the focus of building data management systems that can embrace and exploit hardware and workload heterogeneity. First, I will present Skipper, an end-to-end query execution framework that enables cheap data analytics directly over cold storage devices. Then, I will present Caldera, a new Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) engine that uses heterogeneous processors (CPUs and GPGPUs) in a synergistic fashion for supporting high-throughput transaction workloads and real-time analytical workloads without any compromises. In presenting these systems, I will both highlight the inability of current system designs to deal with emerging hardware and the potential of hardware–software codesign techniques to bring about substantial improvement in price, performance, or power consumption.

Speaker bio

Raja Appuswamy is currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the DIAS lab headed by Prof. Anastasia Ailamaki at EPFL. Previously, he worked as a Visiting Researcher in the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, and as a Software Development Engineer in the Windows 7 kernel team at Microsoft, Redmond.

He received his Ph.D in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, where he worked under the guidance of Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum on designing and implementing a new storage stack for the MINIX 3 microkernel operating system. He also holds dual Masters degrees in Computer Science and Agricultural Engineering from the University of Florida.