Seminar: Amin Vahdat

Amin Vahdat
Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego

Scale Out Networking in the Data Center

April 4, 2011 | 2:00pm | HFH 1132

Co-Presented with the UCSB Computer Engineering Department

Abstract
Scale-out architectures supporting flexible, incremental growth in capacity are common for computing and storage. However, the network remains the last bastion of the traditional scale-up approach, where increasing performance requires increasing levels of specialization at tremendous cost and complexity. Today, the network is often the weak link in data center application performance and reliability. In this talk, we summarize our work in bringing scale out growth of capacity to data center networks. With a focus on the UCSD Triton architecture, we explore issues in managing the network as a single plug-and-play virtualizable fabric scalable to hundreds of thousands of ports and petabits per second of aggregate bandwidth.

Biography
Amin Vahdat is a Professor and holds the Science Applications International Corporation Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego. He is also the Director of UCSD's Center for Networked Systems. Vahdat's research focuses broadly on computer systems, including distributed systems, networks, and operating systems. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Thomas Anderson after spending the last year and a half as a Research Associate at the University of Washington. Before joining UCSD, he was on the faculty at Duke University.  He is a past recipient of the the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award.