camGates and Hillman Centers Photo Tour
School of Computer Science, carnegie Mellon
Computer Science Department
Human-Computer Interaction Inst
Institute for Software Research
Lane Ctr for Computational Biology
Language Technologies Institute
Machine Learning Department
Robotics Institute
Entertainment Technology Center
Extended Menu Contact Info Directory About SCS SCS New Buildings Info Giving to SCS SCS Dean's Advisory Board

SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
4:00 PM - Wean Hall 7500
3:45 PM Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Hall

Bruce Nelson Memorial Lecture

Dr. Alfred Z. Spector
Vice President of Services and Software, IBM Research

Decades of Distributed Computing

We have been studying practical distributed systems for more than 30 years: CMU, with its early multiprocessor work, its many computer science department thrusts, and the Andrew project, has contributed enormously to the field. In conjunction with many other teams, CMU helped establish many of the clear bases of distributed systems. Taken together, these have in turn led our community to an orthodox approach to distributed computing. This approach has been implemented multiple times, each with successively greater capability and complexity. While we seem to be moving in the right direction in terms of function and scale, there is no question that modern distributed computing architectures have an enormous number of protocols, layers, configuration parameters, and APIs. I'll discuss approaches to solving the problem as well as some of the autonomic computing and programming environments activities at IBM aimed at mitigating complexity. In addition, I'll propose areas of additional systems research that are relevant to this issue.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Alfred Z. Spector is Vice President of Services and Software at IBM Research responsible for IBM's worldwide services and software research. Previously, Dr. Spector was the general manager of Marketing and Strategy for IBM's AIM business, responsible for a number of IBM software product families including CICS, WebSphere, and MQSeries, and the general manager of IBM's Transaction Systems business. Dr. Spector was also founder and CEO of Transarc Corporation, a pioneer in distributed transaction processing and wide area file systems, and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Spector is on the board of the Security Industry Middleware Council, Chairman of the NSF CISE Advisory Board, a Board member of the Computer Research Association, and an advisor to the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

Dr. Spector received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and his A.B. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. He was the 2001 recipient of the IEEE Computer Society's Tsutomu Kanai Award for major contributions to state-of-the-art distributed computing systems and their applications. Married and a father of three young children, Dr. Spector is a persistent runner.

<< Back