SCS Faculty Candidate - Babu Pillai

Location:
In Person and Virtual - ET - Newell-Simon 4305 and Zoom

Speaker:
BABU PILLAI, Research Scientist, Intel Labs
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/pspillai/

Out-of-the-Box Thinking in Systems Design and Implementation

As systems scientists, we are generally taught to think about and design systems to be broadly applicable and maximally useful for a wide range of applications.  While this is usually the right mindset to have, sometimes it is necessary to break with conventional approaches and any hope of broad applicability in order to find practical solutions to hard real-world problems.  In this talk, we will look at two case studies of systems that buck convention to achieve target performance goals.  We will first take a deep dive into the Google File System (GFS), a seminal work that defied many of the ideas on how scalable and reliable file systems should be built.  GFS is a topic we occasionally cover in lectures in 15-440/640 (Distributed Systems).  We will then discuss a research prototype for rapid deployment of custom virtual machines in edge infrastructure.  Both of these systems demonstrate that with a clear focus on the critical use case, relaxation of generality, and some clever engineering, we can build systems to meet seemingly impossible goals.  

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Dr. Padmanabhan (Babu) Pillai has been a research scientist at Intel Labs for the past 21 years.  Babu received his M.S.  and Ph.D. in computer science from University of Michigan (in 1999 and 2004), and holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (received in 1996).  His core research interests are in distributed systems, edge computing, and low-power systems.  His recent work includes the use of edge computing to perform real-time understanding of the world and the development of distributed, performant, parallel array frameworks for Python.  Babu has maintained close ties to academic research, and has approximately 100 publications, including three papers awarded Best Paper / Runner up, and one paper that received the SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time award in 2023.  

For the past 10 years, he has been co-instructing the Spring semester 15-440/640 (Distributed Systems) courses with Professor Mahadev Satyanarayanan.  He hopes to apply his broad research and systems experience to teach core systems principles and systems building skills at the undergraduate and graduate levels.  Outside of work Babu is a husband and father of two, and aspires to be an avid gardener and cyclist. Faculty Host: Mark Stehlik 

In Person and Zoom Participation.  See announcement.