Speaker: Russell Sears
Location: Soda 430-438, Woz Lounge
Date: October 7, 2022
Time: 12-1pm PST
Title: Building Correct and Performant Systems from First Principles
Abstract:
Recent hardware-level innovations enable much higher I/O performance than was previously possible. Although many of the underlying technologies have been widely deployed, the performance tradeoffs they pose are not well understood, nor are the software implementation techniques required by high-throughput, low-latency services. Starting with low-level hardware primitives, this talk explains how to achieve PCIe request rates similar to DRAM request rates, then shows how to use lock-free programming techniques to implement correct high-performance application logic in such environments. As I survey these existing techniques, I tie these ideas to recent work in static analysis and declarative systems programming, with a focus on gaps in existing tooling.
Bio:
Russell Sears is a Senior Engineer and Research Scientist at Apple and works on CloudKit and FoundationDB. He was also an early member of the FlashBlade team at Pure Storage. He has also worked as a researcher at Microsoft and Yahoo. While at Yahoo, he contributed to the YSCB benchmarking framework.