Abstract: Server-centric architectures, that pack a small amount of CPU, memory and storage resources on individual servers, have been the mainstay for decades. However, the end of Dennard's scaling and the demise of Moore's Law has led to surfacing of several fundamental limitations of such architectures---the dreaded "memory wall", limited resource density, poor resource utilization, long time-to-adoption of emerging technologies, to name a few. As practitioners are realizing these limitations and are beginning to explore alternatives, it is upon us to guide the design of next-generation hardware and software infrastructure.
In this talk, I will reflect on our community's (ongoing) journey to realize resource disaggregation---an architecture that offers compute, memory and storage resources as individual pools, slices of which can be "stitched" over a network fabric. I will discuss how decoupling of resources in such disaggregated architectures introduces many new systems and algorithmic challenges, some progress towards resolving these challenges, the current state of affairs, and how our journey so far has led to uncovering a myriad of new research questions in systems, networking, architecture, security, and theory.
Bio: Rachit is an associate professor at Cornell University, where he works with an awesome group of students (Saksham Agarwal, Qizhe Cai and Midhul Vuppalapati) on problems related to systems, networking and algorithms. Rachit got his PhD from UIUC in 2013, and is excited to be back in 2023!
Rachit loves teaching, and was awarded the James and Mary Tien teaching award, the highest teaching award in Cornell College of Engineering for sustained excellence and innovation in engineering education. Rachit has also received a Sloan research fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, a distinguished paper award at Usenix Security'20, the best student paper award at SIGCOMM'18, a Google research scholar award, a Google faculty research award, the Rambus research award, and the Wang-Chung research award.
In another life, Rachit was a very mischievous undergrad at IIT Kanpur.
