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Keynotes

Keynote I

The computing landscape has changed drastically in the past years. There are a number of trends that influenced new computing paradigms such as Pervasive Computing, Grid Computing, Cloud Computing. In my talk I will highlight some of the fundamental differences in computing and will motivate the need for a novel abstraction that allows to hide the details of underlying platforms and thus decouples computing platforms from applications.

Tasklets are a joint project with MIT that allows to model computation as a closure that can be executed at various platforms. I will sketch how Tasklets can be be used as a basic abstraction for computation and which further abstractions are needed to support applications.

About the Speaker:

Christian Becker is a full professor for Information Systems at the University of Mannheim since 2006. Prior to this he was a visiting professor for distributed systems at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Spring Term 2006. He studied Computer Science at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Kaiserslautern where he received the Diploma in 1996. From 1997 till 2001 he was a researcher at the distributed systems and operating systems group at the University of Frankfurt where he received his PhD in 2001 with a thesis about “Quality of Service Management in Distributed Object Systems”. In 2001 he joined the distributed systems group at the University of Stuttgart as Post Doc. His research focussed on system support for Pervasive Computing and Peer to Peer Computing. He is specifically interested in architectures for adaptive systems. In 2004 he received the venia legendi (Habilitation) for Computer Science (Informatik). Christian’s research interests are Distributed Systems, Self-Organizing Systems and Context-Aware Computing.

Keynote II

Autonomic Cloud Management (ACM): Challenges and Opportunities Cheng-Zhong Xu Wayne State University, Detroit, USA & Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of CAS, China

Cloud computing, unlocked by virtualization, is emerging as an increasingly important service-oriented computing paradigm. Management is key to providing accurate service availability and performance data and to enabling on-demand real-time capacity planning to meet service demands dynamically. This is because virtualization does not reduce the complexity of a system. In fact, having multiple virtual machines (VMs) running on top of a shared physical computing infrastructure increases the overall system complexity and poses new challenges in systems management. Optimizing one component may compromise the others, leading to overall performance degradation. Frequent component failures here and there would even cause low system productivity.

This talk will start with a review of challenge issues in the management of cloud systems. I will then introduce an Autonomic Cloud Management project underway at Wayne State University and SIAT of CAS, which tackles the cloud service availability, energy efficiency, and reliability issues in feedback control and reinforcement learning approaches. Two case studies will be presented in detail. One is anomaly detection, bottleneck identification, and virtual machine auto-configuration. The other is proactive failure management that deals with failures before they occur in cloud systems. Empirical models built from statistical learning exhibit great potential to help overcome the challenges of scale and uncertainty of clouds.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Cheng-Zhong Xu is a professor of Wayne State University, the Director of the Laboratory for Cloud and Internet Computing, and the Director of Sun's Center of Excellence in Open Source Computing and Applications. Dr. Xu is also a Chief Scientist of Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Director of the Research Center for Cloud Computing of SIAT. Dr. Xu's research interest is mainly in the areas of parallel and distributed systems, cloud and Internet computing, and wireless embedded systems. He has published 180 peer-reviewed papers on these topics, more than 20 in ACM/IEEE transactions. He is the author of "Scalable and Secure Internet Services and Architecture" (Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, 2005) and a co-author of "Load Balancing in Parallel Computers" (Kluwer Academic, 1995). Dr. Xu serves in the editorial boards of a number of leading journals in his areas, including IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. Dr. Xu’s research was supported in part by the “Oversea Outstanding Young Chinese Scholar Program” of NSFC and the “National Thousand Talents Program” of China. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Nanjing University and his Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 1993.