Founded in 1966

Distinguished Lecturer Series

Tuscany: Economy-Based Service-Oriented Computing

John Wilkes

HP Labs

Friday, September 8, 2006
10:30am - SENSQ 5317

Refreshments/meet the speaker at 10:00am

Hosted by Ahmed Amer

Abstract

IT management is a complicated, difficult task. The systems that result are too difficult to change, too expensive to manage, and too fragile. Tuscany is a project at HP Labs on economy-based service-oriented computing, with an emphasis on enterprise-scale information services, that aims to address this. It combines notions from several fields:

  • service providers, which operate within a service-oriented architecture (SOA),
  • self-interest, which uses economic rewards to steer behavior,
  • self-management, which enables cost-effective, lights-out, agile operation, and
  • automated design of service implementations from high-level user goals.

The resulting approach offers many attractive features, and promises to streamline many of the tasks involved in IT management, as well as link IT goals better to business needs. The talk will introduce the Tuscany research domain, provide an overview of the approach, and then discuss some research results and ongoing work in this area.

Biography of Speaker

John Wilkes is an HP Fellow in the Internet Systems and Storage Laboratory of HP Laboratories, where he leads research work into enterprise-scale storage systems, with a particular emphasis on their design and management.

He joined HP Laboratories in 1982, initially to work on the PA-RISC processor architecture, and then participated in or led a number of distributed operating system projects. He started work in storage systems in 1988 with the DataMesh project, and has been active in that area ever since.

Since 1995 he has been the technical lead and group manager of the Storage Systems Program, conducting research into storage systems that can manage themselves. In mid-2000, he turned the management reins over to a colleague so that he could spend more of his time on technical work in this area.

Wilkes has published on a wide range of technical topics, including his PhD thesis work on a novel graphics display (which won both the British Computer Society's Technology Award in 1982, and the Wilkes award in 1984 for the paper about it); high-speed networking (Hamlyn); and storage systems -- including disk array architectures such as HP AutoRAID, AFRAID, and TickerTAIP and most recently, self-managing storage systems.

He has served as a technical conference program committee member on several occasions, including most recently the January 2002 File and Storage Technology (FAST) conference, and he was the program chair for the 1999 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). He is an Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Computer Systems.

Wilkes received a BA and MA in natural sciences (1978 and 1980), a Diploma in computer science (1979) and a PhD in computer science (1984), all from the University of Cambridge. He has held an adjunct Associate Professor appointment at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) since 1996, and is a Fellow of the ACM.

He serves on the Technical Council of the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), and was awarded a SNIA Outstanding Contribution award in 2001 for his development of the SNIA Shared Storage Model. Wilkes is named as inventor or co-inventor on about 25 patent applications, eight of which have been granted so far.

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