Speaker:
Ashraf Aboulnaga
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ashraf/

Date: Monday July 8, 2009
Time: 12:00 – 2:00 pm
Location: Main NU Building (B2) – Auditorium.

Abstract

Virtualization is currently being used in cloud computing environments and traditional IT environments to improve the flexibility and manageability of the computing infrastructure, to enable the sharing of computing resources,and to achieve economies of scale. This means that applications (such as database systems) are increasingly being run on virtual machines and using virtualized storage. The performance of an application in this environment is affected by the configuration and tuning decisions made at the virtual machine/storage level. In this talk, I will demonstrate that coordinating between the application and the virtualization environment when making these tuning decisions can result in significant performance gains. I will present three examples of such application informed tuning: (1) configuring multiple virtual machines running database workloads on the same physical server, (2) improving the caching decisions of a storage server running a database workload, and (3) scheduling a batch of Map-Reduce jobs running on a cluster of virtual machines.

Biography

Ashraf Aboulnaga is an Associate Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. His research interests are in the area of database management, with a currentfocus on virtualization and cloud computing, self-managing database systems, XML databases, and data integration on the web. Ashraf received BS and MS degrees from Alexandria University, and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Wisconsin - Madison, all in Computer Science. He was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Centre from 2002 to 2004. He is an IBM

Centre for Advanced Studies Faculty Fellow and a recipient of a Google Research Award and the Ontario Early Researcher Award.