DATE: Tuesday, August 8, 2017
TIME: Noon - 1:00 pm
PLACE: RMCIC 2101
SPEAKER: Brent Welch, Google
TITLE: Lessons in Distributed Systems
ABSTRACT:
This talk seeks to capture a few key ideas from my experiences in developing computer systems and working in both research and product environments. One theme is simplicity - great ideas are often very simple (in hind sight) but very difficult to formulate. Another theme is the human aspect of computer system design. Your code is a kind of "message in a bottle" to your future self and future co-workers. I will look at these themes in the context of a couple of distributed system examples.
BIO:
Brent got his PhD at UC Berkeley where he built the distributed file system for the Sprite network operating system. (Prof. Gibson was an early Sprite user, and my roommate.) At Xerox PARC he built software for gadgets dreamed up by fellow co-workers (e.g., early color scanners and the Liveboard). He built many tools in Tcl/Tk, including the exmh email user interface and the tclhttpd web server, and wrote Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk. At Panasas he was architect and CTO for a company that built a high performance scalable file system. He is currently at Google working on their public cloud platform.
SEMINAR HOST: Garth Gibson
VISITOR COORDINATOR: Angela Miller
SDI / ISTC SEMINAR QUESTIONS?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/