Keynotes
Keynote 1
Speaker: Stefan Schmid
Affiliation: Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Title: Revolutionizing Datacenter Networks with Optical Circuit Switches and Self-Adjusting Topologies
Abstract: With the growing popularity of cloud computing and data-intensive applications such as machine learning, datacenter networks have become a critical infrastructure for our digital society. Given the explosive growth of datacenter traffic and the slowdown of Moore’s law, significant efforts have been made to improve datacenter network performance over the last decade. A particularly innovative solution is reconfigurable datacenter networks (RDCNs): datacenter networks whose topologies dynamically change over time, in either a demand-oblivious or a demand-aware manner. Such dynamic topologies are enabled by recent optical switching technologies and stand in stark contrast to state-of-the-art datacenter network topologies, which are fixed and oblivious to the actual traffic demand. In particular, reconfigurable demand-aware and “self-adjusting” datacenter networks are motivated empirically by the significant spatial and temporal structures observed in datacenter communication traffic. In this talk, we present an overview of reconfigurable datacenter networks. In particular, we discuss the motivation for such reconfigurable architectures, review the technological enablers, and present a taxonomy that classifies the design space into two dimensions: static vs. dynamic and demand-oblivious vs. demand-aware. We discuss different architectures and protocols for such networks and point out research challenges.
Biography: Stefan Schmid is a Full Professor at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, working part-time for the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT). He is also a Principle Investigator of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. He obtained his diploma (MSc) in Computer Science at ETH Zurich in Switzerland (minor: micro/macro economics, internship: CERN) and did his PhD in the Distributed Computing Group led by Prof. Roger Wattenhofer, also at ETH Zurich. As a postdoc, he worked with Prof. Christian Scheideler at the Chair for Efficient Algorithms at the Technical University of Munich and at the Chair for Theory of Distributed Systems at the University of Paderborn, in Germany. From 2009 to 2015, Stefan Schmid was a senior research scientist at the Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs) and at TU Berlin in Germany (Internet Network Architectures group headed by Prof. Anja Feldmann). In 2013/14, he was an INP Visiting Professor at CNRS (LAAS), Toulouse, France, and in 2014, a Visiting Professor at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. From 2015 to 2018, Stefan Schmid was a (tenured) Associate Professor in the Distributed, Embedded and Intelligent Systems group at Aalborg University, Denmark, and from 2018 to 2021, a Full Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of Vienna, Austria.In 2022, Stefan Schmid was a Fellow at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) in Jerusalem, Israel. Since 2021, he is a Council and Board member of the European Association of Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of the EATCS. Since 2019 Stefan Schmid is an Editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN). From 2015 to 2021, he was the Editor of the Distributed Computing Column of the Bulletin of the EATCS, and from 2016 to 2019, an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (TNSM). Stefan Schmid received the IEEE Communications Society ITC Early Career Award 2016 and acquired several major grants including an ERC Consolidator Grant, various other EU grants (e.g., STREP and IP projects) and national grants (e.g., three FWF projects), a German-Israeli GIF grant, a Villum Fonden grant, a WWTF grant, and various German grants (e.g., from BSI and BMBF). In 2015, he co-founded the startup company Stacktile supported by Germany's EXIST program, and in 2020, he helped establish the Vienna Cybersecurity and Privacy Research Center (ViSP) for which he also served in the executive board. Stefan Schmid's research interests revolve around the fundamental and algorithmic problems of networked and distributed systems.
Keynote 2
Speaker: Ramesh K. Sitaraman
Affiliation: University of Massachusetts Amherst and Akamai Technologies
Title: Living on the Edge for a Quarter Century: A Personal Retrospective
Abstract: As Akamai and the creation of the “edge” turn 25, we look back at the key role that the edge has played in the evolution of internet services. The story of the edge started in the late 1990s when servers were deployed worldwide to provide content delivery services for web pages and videos. The quest to move dynamic content and application logic closer to users created the first edge computing services a few years later. The growth of the edge that now spans thousands of locations has dramatically increased the scope and importance of services that critically rely on it. This has created new challenges in operating the edge at scale and securing it from sophisticated attacks. Further, the growth of AI has precipitated novel services that host and serve ML models from the edge. Finally, as the carbon footprint of the edge grows rapidly, reimagining a sustainable “zero-carbon” edge powered by renewable energy poses a key direction for future research.
Biography: Ramesh K. Sitaraman is a Distinguished University Professor and Associate Dean in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research focuses on multiple facets of Internet-scale distributed systems, including algorithms, architectures, performance, and sustainability. He is best known for pioneering content delivery and edge computing services that currently deliver much of the world’s web content, streaming videos, and online applications. As a principal architect at Akamai, he helped create the world’s first major content delivery network (CDN) and later the first edge computing service. He retains a part-time role as Akamai’s Chief Consulting Scientist.
Prof. Sitaraman is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. He is a recipient of the inaugural ACM SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award for his work on the Akamai CDN, the ACM IMC Test-of-Time award for his work on video quality, an Excellence in DASH award for his contribution to the MPEG-DASH reference video player standard, and the IEEE William R. Bennett Prize for his work on adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms for video streaming that are widely used in practice. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award (DTA), the university’s highest recognition of teaching. He received a B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University.
