Abstract:

New workloads are creating opportunities for novel optimized computing 
platforms in the datacenter. Furthermore, modern data centers are growing 
due to economies of scale and are facing significant challenges around 
power, underutilization, and high management cost.

The first part of this presentation will focus on how the requirements 
of workload consolidation, real world aware and network optimized computing 
will result in a diversity of platforms optimized for power and cost. I will 
discuss optimal SMP design points, stream processing, and the role of massive 
muticore and hybrid architectures. 

The second part of the presentation will focus on the simplification of 
systems management.  A new "datacenter architecture" is emerging to support 
massive application growth. This trend, coupled with some key technology 
trends such as virtualization and autonomic-homogeneous server-ensembles, will 
lead to fundamental changes in traditional enterprise datacenters. I will describe
an exciting "living-lab" we have created IBM Research to explore this new data 
center architecture. 



Tilak Agerwala

Dr. Tilak Agerwala is vice president, Systems at IBM Research. He is
responsible for all IBM's Systems research activities worldwide in Deep
Computing (for example Blue Gene, Cell and the DARPA HPCS project) and
commercial systems (for example, BladeCenter, System p, and mainframes).
This research spans the space from microprocessors and tools to operating
systems and systems management, and also includes novel algorithms and
computational biology. Tilak joined IBM at the T.J. Watson Research Center
and has held executive positions at IBM in research, advanced development,
development, marketing and business development. His research interests are
in the area of high performance computer architectures and systems. Tilak
received the W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE in 1998 for
"outstanding contributions to the development of high performance
computers." He is a founding member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a
Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received
his B.Tech. in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of
Technology, Kanpur, India and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.