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. Irene is supported by NSF and MSR
fellowships.