Towards New Systems for Mobile/Cloud Applications

The proliferation of datacenters, smartphones, personal sensing and tracking devices, and home automation products is fundamentally changing the applications we interact with daily.  Today's popular user applications are no longer limited to a single desktop computer but now commonly span many mobile devices and cloud servers. As a result, existing systems often do not meet the needs of modern mobile/cloud applications.  In this talk, I will present three systems designed to tackle the challenges of mobile/cloud applications: Sapphire, Diamond and TAPIR.  These systems represent a first step towards better end-to-end support for mobile/cloud applications in runtime management, data management, and distributed transactional storage. Together, they significantly simplify the development of new mobile/cloud applications.

Irene Zhang is a fifth-year PhD student at the University of Washington. She works with Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy in the Computer Systems Lab. Her current research focuses on systems for large-scale, distributed applications, including distributed runtime systems and transactional storage systems. Before starting her PhD, Irene worked for three years at VMware in the virtual machine monitor group. Irene received her S.B. and M. Eng. in computer science from MIT, where she worked with Frans Kaashoek in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Lab.