Today’s distributed systems are increasingly virtualized and software-defined. While in principle, this introduces interesting new opportunities, e.g., in terms of resource allocation and traffic engineering, it also raises the question of how to algorithmically exploit the new flexibilities, and how to operate and control such dynamic systems without violating correctness and consistency properties. In this talk, we will highlight some of the fundamental problems of deploying, operating, and allocating software-defined distributed systems, and explore their algorithmic solutions. In particular, my talk will revolve around our recent work on Panopticon (ATC 2014), C3 (NSDI 2015), STN (INFOCOM 2015), as well as on in-band mechanisms (HotNets 2014) and security-critical policy updates (HotNets 2014).

About Stefan Schmid

CV: I studied Computer Science at ETH Zurich (minor: micro/macro economics, internship: CERN) and received my PhD from the Distributed Computing Group (Prof. Roger Wattenhofer), also at ETH Zurich. Subsequently, I had the pleasure to work with Prof. Christian Scheideler at the Chair for Efficient Algorithms at the Technical University of Munich and at the Chair for Theory of Distributed Systems at the University of Paderborn. I now work at the T-Labs and at TU Berlin (group headed by Prof. Anja Feldmann) as a senior research scientist. In 2013/14, I was an INP Visiting Professor at CNRS (LAAS), Toulouse, France, and in 2014, I was a Visiting Professor at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Research interests: Distributed computing and networks; virtualization and SDN; (distributed and online) algorithms; design of robust and dynamic distributed systems; network economics (incentives, game theory, mechanism design).

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This event will be conducted in English