System Design for Cloud Services

Kathryn S. McKinley is a Principal Research at Microsoft. She was previously an Endowed Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in creating systems that make programming easy and the resulting programs correct and efficient. She is an IEEE and ACM Fellow.

Thomas Wenisch is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, specializing in computer architecture. His prior research includes memory streaming for commercial server applications, multiprocessor memory systems, memory disaggregation, and rigorous sampling-based performance evaluation methodologies. His ongoing work focuses on computational sprinting, server and data center architectures, programming models for byte-addressable NVRAM, and architectures to enable hand-held 3D ultrasound. Wenisch received the NSF CAREER award in 2009. Prior to his academic career, Wenisch was a software developer at American Power Conversion, where he worked on data center thermal topology estimation. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Boris Grot is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His research seeks to address efficiency bottlenecks and capability shortcomings of processing platforms for big data. Grot received his PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin and spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at EPFL.

Douglas Carmean is currently an Architect at Microsoft exploring the role of advanced technology in the context of future computing ecosystems. Previously, Doug was an Intel Fellow and Director of the Efficient Computing Lab at Intel. He is responsible for creating the vision and concept for the Xeon Phi family products, an architecture for highly parallel workloads based on Intel Architecture processors. Carmean founded a new group at Intel to define, build and productize the Xeon Phi family.

Sherief Reda is an Associate Professor at the School of Engineering, Brown University. He joined the computer engineering group at Brown after receiving his PhD from UCSD in 2006. His research interests are in the area of computer engineering with emphasis on energy-efficient computing systems, low-power circuit design, and CAD tools. Professor Reda received a number of awards and acknowledgments, including best paper awards in DATE 2002 and ISLPED 2010, a first place award in ISPD VLSI placement contest in 2005, best paper nominations in ICCAD 2005, ASPDAC 2008 and ICCAD 2015. He is a recipient of NSF CAREER award.

Lingjia Tang is an assistant professor of EECS at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, she was a research faculty member at UCSD CSE Department 2012-2013.  Her research focuses on computer architecture and software systems, especially such systems for large-scale data centers. Her publication at ASPLOS ’15 and Micro’11 are selected as IEEE Micro Top Picks. She received a best paper award at IEEE/ACM International Conference of Code Generation and Optimization (CGO) 2012. Her publication at International Symposium of Computer Architecture is selected as one of the excellence papers 2011 by Google Research. More information can be found at ClarityLab (opens in new tab) and Lingjia Tang’s personal website (opens in new tab).

Sameh Elnikety is a researcher at Microsoft Research. His research focuses on experimental distributed systems, spanning a number of areas including operating systems, distributed computing and databases. Sameh’s research has impacted several important systems including Azure Machine Learning, Bing, MSN, SQL Azure DB, and Windows scheduling. His work on database replication received the best paper award at Eurosys 2007, and some of the resulting distributed techniques are integrated into MySQL Replication, and soon in SQL Azure DB. Sameh earned his PhD from EPFL in 2007 and MS from Rice in 2003.

Benjamin Lee is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. Dr. Lee received his B.S. from UC Berkeley, his Ph.D. from Harvard, and his post-doctorate from Stanford. He has held visiting positions at Microsoft Research, Intel Labs, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Dr. Lee’s research focuses on computer architectures, distributed systems, and algorithmic economics. His research has been honored twice with Top Picks by IEEE Micro, twice with Research Highlights by the Communications of the ACM, and with an ASPLOS Best Paper Award. Dr. Lee has received the NSF CAREER Award and Computing Innovation Fellowship.

Adam Wierman is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where he is a founding member of the Rigorous Systems Research Group (RSRG) and maintains a blog called Rigor + Relevance. His research interests center around resource and scheduling decisions in computer systems and services. He received the 2011 ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star award, the 2014 IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize, and coauthored best paper awards at ACM SIGMETRICS, IEEE INFOCOM, IFIP Performance (twice), IEEE Green Computing Conference, IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, and ACM GREENMETRICS.

Doug Burger manages the HDX group in MSR NExT. His team is innovating in cloud and silicon architectures, new client devices, architectures for machine learning, and new application models for deep personalization. Prior to joining MSR in 2008, he spent ten years on the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. He was the co-founder and co-leader of both the TRIPS and Catapult projects.

Karin Strauss is a researcher in computer architecture at Microsoft Research and an associate affiliate faculty in computer science and engineering at University of Washington. Her research focuses on emerging memory technologies and how to use them reliably and efficiently into systems.

Ion Stoica is a Professor in the EECS Department at University of California at Berkeley. He does research on cloud computing and networked computer systems. Past work includes the Dynamic Packet State (DPS), Chord DHT, Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3), declarative networks, replay-debugging, and multi-layer tracing in distributed systems. He is an ACM Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the SIGCOMM Test of Time Award (2011), and the ACM doctoral dissertation award (2001). In 2006, he co-founded Conviva, a startup to commercialize technologies for large scale video distribution, and in 2013, he co-founded Databricks a startup to commercialize Apache Spark.

Marc Tremblay is a Distinguished Engineer in the Silicon and Technology Group at Microsoft. His current role involves defining the strategic silicon roadmap for a broad range of products from devices to servers. His primary sphere of influence covers highly-integrated multi-core server SoCs, accelerators, as well as innovative multi-core SoCs for emerging devices. Marc has published numerous papers on throughput computing, multi-cores, scout threading, transactional memory, speculative multi-threading, Java computing, etc. He is the inventor of approximately 200 patents on those and other topics.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 2009, Marc was the CTO of Microelectronics at Sun Microsystems, where he was a Sun Fellow and SVP. In his role as CTO he was responsible for the technical leadership of over 1200 engineers. Throughout his career, Marc has conceived, initiated, architected, led, defined and shipped a variety of microprocessors such as: superscalar RISC processors (UltraSPARC I/II), bytecode engines (picoJava), VLIW, media and Java-focused (MAJC) as well as the first processor to implement speculative multithreading and transactional memory (ROCK – first silicon). He was nominated as Innovator of the year by EDN. He received his Physics Engineering degree from Laval University in Canada and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Sciences from UCLA.