Windows Azure: An Operating System for the Cloud

Guest Speaker: Brad Calder, Microsoft Director of Engineering; Adjunct Professor, CSE Date: December 3rd, 2008 Time: 11am Location: Room 1202, CSE Building, UC San Diego Host: Amin Vahdat, Director, CNS

DESCRIPTION/ABSTRACT: Brad Calder is the Architect of "Windows Azure Storage," and this talk is co-sponsored by CSE and the Center for Networked Systems. Windows Azure is the lowest layer of the Microsoft cloud platform, recently unveiled at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2008. It is an "operating system for the cloud" that provides virtualized computation, scalable storage, automated management, and a rich developer SDK for the cloud. Dr. Calder will provide an overview of the opportunities and key problems that cloud computing is solving, and the solutions provided by the computation, storage and management components of Windows Azure. SPEAKER BIO: Brad Calder recently left the Jacobs School to join Microsoft as Director of Engineering, after being on the Computer Science and Engineering faculty since January 1997. Calder earned undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics from the University of Washington, and received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1995. In 1995-96, Calder was a principal engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab. Also in 1996, he co-founded a company in the Bay Area called Tracepoint. While on the UCSD faculty, Calder also co-founded Entropia. From 2000-02, he was also the company's Director of Platform Engineering. Entropia provides enterprise desktop distributed computing grid solutions. Professor Calder's research interests include customized processors, simulation methodology, prefetching and stream processors, critical path prediction, dynamic compilation and optimization, predicated execution, memory hierarchy placement optimizations, branch and fetch prediction, value-based optimization and value prediction, and performance of mobile code. Since Fall 1999, Calder also organized an annual UCSD competition to pick the best undergraduate computer programmers, and every year a team coached by Calder has gone to the World Finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. MORE INFORMATION: The public is welcome to attend. For more information, contact Kathy Krane at kkrane@ucsd.edu or call 858-822-5964. For a map of the campus, go to http://maps.ucsd.edu/Default.htm.