Computer Science Seminar - University of Houston
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Computer Science Seminar

Scalable Virtual Data Structures

Seminar Slides: Download (PDF)

When: Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Thomas Schwarz SJ, Universidad Católica del Uruguay

Host: Paris

Scalable virtual data structures extend the map-reduce environment to enable the autonomous workload assignment in cloud data center for brute force calculations.
Many optimization problems such as the knapsack problem, the traveling salesman problem, 0-1 integer programming, and so forth are easily solvable through brute force, i.e., enumerating all feasible solutions, evaluating them, and retaining the best seen feasible solution as the solution of the optimization problem. As the cloud has brought low-cost on-demand distributed computing to the masses, these brute force attacks have now become feasible for much larger solution spaces.
We present scalable virtual data structures as a way to autonomously assign and supervise the distributed work in a cloud environment. Computations in a scalable virtual data structure are similar to a scan operation in a scalable, distributed data structure, but the records are generated during the scan as the potential solution of the problem at hand. We show how the organization should deal with heterogeneity in capacity (some virtual nodes are located on heavily loaded physical nodes) and demand (some enumeration tasks are easier than others, for example, one might be able to exclude many virtual records as infeasible). Finally, we address failure-tolerance issues.
This is a first report on on-going research with Witold Litwin of the Université Paris- Dauphine.

Bio:Dr. Thomas Schwarz, S.J. is Professor and Head of the Departamento de Informática y Ciencias de la Computación (DICC) at the Universidad Catòlica del Uruguay, in Montevideo, Uruguay. He is also a Catholic priest member of the Society of Jesus, California Province. Previously he was on the faculty at Santa Clara University. Dr. Schwarz obtained his Doctorate in Mathematics (Dr. rer. nat.) at the Fern-University in Hagen, Germany and his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include large storage systems, reliability of large systems, and scalable distributed data structures