DATE: Wednesday, September 12, 2007
TIME: 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
PLACE: WeH 8220

SPEAKER:
Andrés Lagar-Cavilla
University of Toronto

TITLE:
Interactive Resource-Intensive Applications Made Easy

ABSTRACT:
Snowbird is a middleware system that simplifies the development and deployment of bimodal applications that alternate between phases with heavy computational-resource needs and phases rich in user interaction. Examples include digital animation, as well as scientific, medical, and engineering diagnostic and design tools. Traditionally, these applications have been manually partitioned into distributed components to take advantage of remote computational resources while still providing low-latency user interaction. Instead, Snowbird lets developers design their applications as monolithic units, and automatically migrates the application to the optimal execution site to achieve short completion time and crisp interactive performance. Snowbird does not require that applications be written in a specific language, or use specific libraries, and it can be used with existing applications, including closed-source ones, without requiring recompilation or relinking. Snowbird achieves these goals by augmenting VM migration with an interaction-aware migration manager, support for graphics hardware acceleration, and a wide-area peer-to-peer storage system.

BIO:
Andrés Lagar-Cavilla is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He received his M.Sc. in Computer Science September, also from the U of T in 2004, and his B.A.Sc. in Computer Systems Engineering in 1998 from the Universidad Nacional del Sur university Bahia Blanca, Argentina. He is currently working on the Snowbird project -- a VM-based application migration project. With Snowbird, applications that alternate between computational and interactive phases are seamlessly migrated, combining the best of remote and local execution.

Seminar Host: M. Satyanarayanan
Visitor Coordinator: Tracy Farbacher

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/