Abstract - Increasingly Big Data computing is being applied to some of the world's most difficult, most urgent problems. This talk will describe the nature of Big Data computing and present technology that has been developed to allow Big Data computing systems to address these challenges. We discuss the design of systems for Big Data and their corresponding middleware and look at how both of these might evolve and challenge the current thinking about Big Data systems. Finally we motivate shared-memory heterogeneous architectures in this context and we discuss the coherent attach processor interface on Power 8 as a concrete example of how to achieve a system-level benefit.
Short bio - H. Peter Hofstee currently works at the IBM Austin Research Laboratory on workload-optimized and hybrid systems. Peter has degrees in theoretical physics (MS, Rijks Universiteit Groningen, Netherlands) and computer science (PhD, California Inst. of Technology). At IBM Peter has worked on microprocessors, including the first CMOS processor to demonstrate GHz operation (1997), and he was the chief architect of the synergistic processor elements in the Cell Broadband Engine, known from its use in the Sony Playstation 3 and the Roadrunner supercomputer that first broke the 1 Petaflop Linpack benchmark. His interests include VLSI, multicore and heterogeneous microprocessor architecture, security, system design and programming. Peter is an IBM master inventor with over 100 patents.