Register for ACM India Industry Webinar on 9 May with Suparna Bhattacharya: "AI/ML/Big Data Analytics: When Will System Software Catch Up?"

April 30, 2020

Continuing with our initiative of conducting multiple webinars during the COVID-19 related lockdown period, here is the next session of the series. While AI, ML, Big Data are all pervasive, there are some questions to be asked of the mechanisms needed to support them. This thought-provoking talk by our ACM India Eminent Speaker and a distinguished technologist explores this conundrum.

Register now for the next session of our ACM India Industry Webinar series, "AI/ML/Big Data Analytics: When Will System Software Catch Up?", to be presented on Saturday 9 May 2020 at 11 am IST by Suparna Bhattacharya, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs. The host for this session will be Hemant Pande, Executive Director of ACM India Council.

All students, faculty and industry professionals are welcome to attend the webinar. Feel free to forward this communication to those who would be interested.

Note : You can also stream this webinar on your mobile device, including smartphone and tablet.

Abstract: The AI/ML wave has spurred an exciting ecosystem of analytics platforms and software frameworks. Yet, despite all the advancement in recent years, current day operating systems and storage servers are still far from being naturally geared at next generation big data analytics. Much innovation in this space has instead been realized via layers of middleware that step around the gaps between the needs of this emerging application computing environment and the world that established operating system mechanisms such as virtual memory and storage architectures were traditionally designed for. However, such diffusion of OS and storage system functionality from the core of the system to higher layers in the stack introduces inefficiencies and challenges of cross-layer coordination and adaptation with the evolution of new system architectures.

The landscape of hardware technologies is undergoing fundamental changes with the advent of byte-addressable non-volatile memory, photonic interconnects, hardware accelerators and specialized SOCs. The landscape of software deployments is also undergoing fundamental changes with the shift to containers in a cloud native ecosystem across hybrid cloud and IoT edge to core workflows. Is it, perhaps, time to take a step back and co-design stacks more systematically to cope with the rising gravity of digital data and the numerous models that process them? This talk explores the question of what it could it take to revitalize native system software mechanisms both in storage layers and operating systems to keep up with the intrinsic needs of AI and big data analytics in the Software 2.0 era.

Duration : 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter:
Dr. Suparna Bhattacharya is a Distinguished Technologist in the AI research lab at Hewlett Packard Labs. She has over 26 years of experience in systems software development and research, the last six at HPE, preceded by 21 years at IBM, where she was an elected member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Starting around 2000, she enjoyed several years of open source contributions to the Linux kernel, and was a regular contributor to the (invitation-only) Linux Kernel Summit.

Over the last decade, she developed a passion for blending insights from diverse technical domains to explore innovations that span technology boundaries, such as rethinking systems software stacks in the era of AI and Internet of Things. In her previous role in HPE Storage she was responsible for the architecture and technical strategy of HPE SimpliVity hyper-converged edge and containers. Suparna is an ACM India Eminent Speaker, and an active member of the systems community, having served on program committees for ASPLOS, OOPSLA, MASCOTS, ECOOP, HotStorage and USENIX FAST conferences. She recently co-authored (with Doug Voigt and Kanchi Gopinath) Resource Proportional Software Design for Emerging Systems, published by CRC Press.

Suparna holds a (late-in-life) PhD in Computer Science and Automation (2013) from the Indian Institute of Science, and a BTech in Electronics and Electrical Communication (1993) from IIT Kharagpur.

Host:
Dr. Hemant Pande, Executive Director, ACM India Council