Keynote
We have the pleasure of welcoming our keynote speakers at CompSys'24.
Monday 27 May, 10:00 |
Title: Affordable and sustainable data- and compute-intensive radio astronomy |
By Roelien Attema-Van Waas and Chris Broekema, ASTRON |
Abstract:
Radio astronomy is a relatively new area of science that relies
heavily on the abundant availability of data- and
compute-capacity. One could even argue that the advent of affordable
compute power, in the form of general purpose mini-computers in the
1970s, made the construction of aperture synthesis arrays like the one
in Westerbork possible. More recently, in the early 2000s, ASTRON
designed and built the LOFAR telescope to take advantage of the steady
increase of available compute power. This is one of the very first
'software telescopes', where a massive amount of complexity is
offloaded from the hardware into the software (with all the
appropriate growing pains we are only now starting to really
understand).
This predictable and inevitable increase in compute capability can no longer be relied upon. Worse, we are now faced with instruments that can produce far more data than we can affordably process. For future telescopes, like the Square Kilometre Array and even more ambitious later telescopes we could easily be overwhelmed by the virtual deluge of data being foisted on the scientist. I this talk we will briefly introduce radioastronomy and the specific R&D challenges and we will go into some detail on the anatomy of a modern large-scale distributed radio telescope, what processing needs to be done with the collected data, and how we are preparing to process the fire-hose of data to be collected by modern instruments. New and emerging technologies play a central role in this strategy. |
Short bio Roelien Attema – Head of R&D at ASTRON:
Inspired by leading-edge innovation and creating impact in society
with new insights and technology she is working the field of applied
science for 25 years. Starting at KPN Research, she worked at TNO for
almost 20 years in different roles from expert, account manager,
project manager to business consultant. Her interest in organisations
and people led her to roles in innovation management. She is part of
the ASTRON MT and as Head of the R&D department - a group of around 65
professionals covering the full signal processing chain - responsible
for all technological innovation within ASTRON. As member of the Board
of the Innovation Cluster Drachten she is committed to strengthen the
collaboration between industry and academic partners in the North of
the Netherlands.
Short bio Chris Broekema:
Chris Broekema is a senior research staff member at the Netherlands
Institute for Radio Astronomy since 2003. Over the years he has
focused most of his work on compute- and data transport hardware
design for radio astronomy. He has designed, built, procured, operated
and worked on high-performance computing systems for the LOFAR
telescope in the Netherlands, including some of the fastest
supercomputers in the world at the time, since 2004. More recently his
focus shifted to the computational and data-transport challenges in
the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), where he was responsible for the
hardware platform design of the SKA Science Data Processor (SDP).
|
Tuesday 28 May, 9:30 |
Title: Interactive and Connected Battery-Free Systems |
By Przemysław Pawełczak, Associate Professor Embedded Systems Group, TU Delft |
Abstract: In this talk, I will present some advancements in designing interactive and wirelessly connected ultra-low power, battery-free systems. I will discuss how low-density energy buffers (such as capacitors) and energy harvesting sources - both forming a sustainable alternative to batteries - require a rethink of communication, computation, and interaction paradigms. We will explore these new design paradigms by examining case studies in handheld gaming, electronic prototyping, and low-power wireless networking. |
Short bio: Przemysław Pawełczak is an associate professor within the Embedded and Networked Systems Group of TU Delft leading Sustainable Systems Lab. His research vision is to make Internet of Things free from batteries, less polluting and sustainable. With his students Przemysław Pawełczak performs research that is experiment- and systems-oriented (where system is a creation of new hardware and software). |
Tuesday 28 May, 14:00 |
Title: Sustainable Deep Learning: A Systems Perspective |
Joint Keynote with NCCV, by Professor Lin Wang, Paderborn University |
Abstract: Deep learning (DL) has undeniably revolutionized many fields, but its rapid expansion has put a significant strain on our computing infrastructure. As we celebrate breakthroughs in areas such as computer vision with unprecedentedly large DL models, we must face a stark reality: Our current trajectory is not sustainable. In this talk, I will discuss some of the systems challenges in serving large DL models. In doing so, I will emphasize the critical need for collaboration between deep learning and systems researchers in order to forge a sustainable path forward. |
Short bio: Lin Wang is currently a full professor and head of the Computer Networks group at Paderborn University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015. Before joining Paderborn University, he was a tenured Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and held positions at TU Darmstadt, SnT Luxembourg, and IMDEA Networks Institute. His research focuses on networked systems at the edge and in the cloud, with the goal of achieving efficiency and sustainability. His work has received several awards, including a Google Research Scholar Award, an Outstanding Paper Award from RTSS 2022, Best Paper Awards from IPCCC 2023 and HotPNS 2016, and an Athene Young Investigator Award from TU Darmstadt. |