SPECIAL SYSTEMS SEMINAR

DATE: Thursday, May 22, 2008
TIME: 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
PLACE: CIC 2101

SPEAKER:
Michael Isard
Microsoft Research

TITLE:
Dryad and DryadLINQ:
General-purpose distributed data-parallel programming using a high-level language

ABSTRACT:
Dryad is a general-purpose distributed execution engine for coarse-grain data-parallel applications. A Dryad application combines computational "vertices" with communication "channels" to form a data-flow graph. The Dryad C++ APIs support very general computations and dynamic optimization strategies, and are a good "middleware" target for higher-level programming abstractions. DryadLINQ is one such high-level programming model. It offers a novel hybrid of imperative and declarative programming, integrated with C#. DryadLINQ automatically generates high-performance distributed execution plans from sequential C# code, and has been used in domains such as web-scale data-processing, network-traffic monitoring, and machine learning.

BIO:
Michael Isard has been a researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley since 2002. His research background was originally in computer vision and statistical inference, but most of his current work is in systems. Several recent projects focus on programming models that make it easier to exploit parallel and distributed computing resources.

Visitor Host: David Andersen

Visitor Coordinator & Appointments:
For more information or questions: Angie Miller, 8-6645, amiller@andrew.cmu.edu

For Further Seminar Info:
, or visit http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/