HPC USER COMMUNITY SESSION at HiPC 2005
Tuesday December 20th 2005

Speaker: Arvind Jain
Google India

(DOC) (PDF)

Abstract:
I will talk about Google's search cluster architecture that uses more than 15000 commodity class PCs to deliver superior search performance at a fraction of the cost of a system built from fewer, but more expensive, high-end servers. I'll mention some of the challenges we have faced in making such large scale deployment of commodity hardware work well. In particular, I will talk about some of our distributed systems software infrastructure that we have built to manage the underlying unreliable hardware and make rapid development and deployment of new scalable web services like Gmail, Google Earth etc.

Profile:
Arvind Jain is a member of Google's systems laboratory and currently the head of Google India R&D center. At Google, he has worked on various infrastructure projects including the crawl and indexing system, distributed file replication system, and compression techniques for large scale storage systems. Before joining Google, he was the founding engineer at Riverbed Corporation, a networking startup that builds caching and compression based appliances to speed up WAN interactions from remote offices in an enterprise. Prior to Riverbed, he was the architect of the streaming and storage division at Akamai Technologies where he helped build Akamai's distributed video on demand and live broadcasting service. He started his career at Microsoft Corporation where he worked on various components in the Windows NT kernel. He holds an M.S. and BTech in Computer Science from University of Washington and Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, respectively.

Speaker: Dr Debasis Dash
Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR), Delhi, India

Abstract:
GenoCluster: A novel platform for Comparative Genomics
(DOC) (PDF)

Profile: Debasis Dash completed his PhD in Biophysical Chemistry from the University of Delhi (1998). He is currently working as a scientist in the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi, India in Genome Informatics division. He has made significant contributions towards development of in silico tools for large scale comparative genomics studies and some of the software developed by him are being commercially available and are being extensively used by academic institutes. His major contribution is in the development of a functional annotation tool PLHOST, CoPS database and GenoCluster. He has also contributed towards identification of functional signature and structural determinant using the concept of peptide library. He has been responsible for the development of the software platform and portal for Indian Genome Variation that integrates phenotype-genotype data of normal Indian subpopulations. He has been awarded the CSIR Young Scientist Award (2004).

Speaker: Srikanth Sundarrajan
Software Engineering and Technology Labs (SETLabs),Infosys, India

Abstract:
As Grid moves beyond the traditional HPC and scientific computational problems and reaches out to the enterprises, there is a distinct set of issues to be addressed. System virtualization at the infrastructure layer promises to provide the isolation, fault tolerance and quality of service guarantees that traditional grid systems fail to address completely. The dedicated Grid R&D team at Infosys has a specific focus on system virtualization and how that can complement Grid in taking this exciting technology forward. Focus of the presentation would be to deliberate on the need for system virtualization at the infrastructure layer and some insights into our research direction in this area.

Profile: Srikanth Sundarrajan is a Technical Architect with the High Performance Computing Division at the Software Engineering and Technology Labs (SETLabs), Infosys, leading the virtualization research. Prior to joining Infosys, he was architecting and building enterprise web solutions around Microsoft technologies. He has earned his MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California. His special interests include architecting distributed systems and networking technologies. He has contributed to a few open source projects including NS-2.