Dynamic Adaptive Optimization: Recovering from Hardware Errors and Software Crashes in a Distributed Virtual Machine

Speaker

University of California, Santa Cruz

Host

Julian Shun
MIT CSAIL
Abstract: TidalScale was a startup aquired by HPE in December 2022. TidalSale developed a software architecture called distributed virtual machines. Today's virtual machines in widespread use today allows multiple operating systems to share a server. TidalScale inverts this paradigm. A single virtual machine running on TidalScale runs a single operating system instance across a cluster of standard servers. This virtual machine sits between an operating system and a cluster of servers. It runs on premise or in the cloud. Because they are virtual, resources like processors and memory can migrate among nodes in the cluster. The virtual machine dynamically self-optimizes resource placement in real time under contol of a set of machine learning algorithms. Servers can automatically and dynamically be added and removed depending on fluctuationg workloads, allowing for dynamic hardware scalability, but also increasing reliability and resiliency. In this talk, we specifically show how these servers automatically, without any human intervention, recover from most hardware failures, and and provide excellent restart performance should OS failures occur.

Bio: Ike Nassi is a consultant and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz, a Founding Trustee at the Computer History Museum and an advisory board member of TTI/Vanguard. Ike was the founder of TidalScale, sold to HPE Dec. 2022. Previously, he was an Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist at SAP.

Ike started or helped to start four companies: Encore Computer Corporation building hierarchical strongly coherent shared memory symmetric multiprocessors (1984); InfoGear Technology, which developed both Internet appliances (including the first iPhone) (1996); Firetide, an early wireless mesh networking company (2000), and TidalScale (2012).

He was SVP for Software at Apple Computer and a Corporate Officer. He worked at Visual Technology, and Digital Equipment Corporation. In the past, Dr. Nassi was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, twice a Research Scientist at MIT, and a Visiting Scholar at University of California, Berkeley. He has served on the board of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, and the IEEE Computer Society Industry Advisory Board. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stony Brook University.

He was awarded two certificates for Distinguished Service from the Department of Defense, one for his work on the design of the programming language Ada and one for his work on DARPA ISAT. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and a Life member of ACM. He is named on over 35 patents.