Edward D. Lazowska

• University of Washington

THE ENGINEERING COMMUNITY HAS BEEN WORKING FOR decades to increase the representation of women in universities and in the profession, but progress has been slow. In the United States, just 21 percent of engineering bachelor's degrees go to women, and only 11 percent of practicing engineers are women. While the problem is complex, we must recognize...

WE APPLAUD THE recommendations of V. Stodden et al. for “Enhancing reproducibility for computational methods” (Policy Forum, 9 December 2016, p. [1240][1]). Many of their recommendations could be fulfilled if researchers embraced modern statistical and computational (“data science”)

We analyze the workload from a multi-year deployment of a database-as-a-service platform targeting scientists and data scientists with minimal database experience. Our hypothesis was that relatively minor changes to the way databases are delivered can increase their use in ad hoc analysis environments. The web-based SQLShare system emphasizes easy...

During the Summer of 2015, the University of Washington eScience Institute ran an interdisciplinary summer internship program focused on urban informatics, civic engagement, and data-intensive social science. Borrowing elements from the successful Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) programs at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech, and buildi...

We are at the dawn of a new age of data-intensive discovery that will dramatically impact all fields of science, and integrate them with the methodology fields of computer science, statistics, and applied mathematics. In this talk, Ill begin by looking at my own field of computer science, then consider how smart discovery is revolutionizing all fie...

The 2013 Lasker∼Bloomberg Public Service Award will be given to Bill and Melinda Gates "for leading an historic transformation in the way we view the globe's most pressing health concerns and improving the lives of millions of the world's most vulnerable."

There are many reasons for striving to increase the representation of women in the computing field, but the most com-pelling one is the enhanced quality of the solutions diverse contributors can achieve. W e are honored to have been invited to address the "how" of broadening participation in com-puting by describing our experiences at a large, rese...

This session is intended as an open discussion between a small group of panelists and the conference attendees. What can we do as a community to increase the impact (whatever that means) of our research, especially with the rise in paper counts, write only conferences, over-specialization of ourselves and our students, migration of distinguished re...

Advances in cyber infrastructure for virtual observatories are poised to allow scientists from disparate fields to conduct experiments together, monitor large collections of instruments, and explore extensive archives of observed and simulated data. Such systems, however, focus on the `plumbing' and frequently ignore the critical importance of rich...

Science is becoming data-intensive, requiring new software architectures that can exploit resources at all scales: local GPUs for interactive visualization, server-side multi-core machines with fast processors and large memories, and scalable, pay-as-you-go cloud resources. Architectures that seamlessly and flexibly exploit all three platforms are...

Scientific workflows have gained popularity for modeling and executing in silico experiments by scientists for problem-solving. These workflows primarily engage in computation and data transformation tasks to perform scientific analysis in the Science Cloud. Increasingly workflows are gaining use in managing the scientific data when they arrive fro...

From the LoC symposium, sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium and the Computing Research Association

From the LoC symposium, sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium and the Computing Research Association

A 2.5 page report outlining why the United States should launch a strategic national research initiative in synthetic biology

Scientific workflows have become an archetype to model in silico experiments in the Cloud by scientists. There is a class of workflows that are used to by "data valets" to prepare raw data from scientific instruments into a science-ready form for use by scientists. These share data-intensive traits with traditional scientific workflows, yet differ...

Physical, chemical, and biological ocean processes play a crucial role in determining Earth's environment. Unfortunately, our knowledge of these processes is limited because oceanography is carried out today largely the way it was a century ago: as expeditionary science, going to sea in ships and measuring a relatively small number of parameters (e...

We introduce Trident, a scientific workflow workbench that is built on top of a commercial workflow system to leverage existing functionality. Trident is being developed in collaboration with the scientific community for oceanography, but the workbench itself can be used for any science project for scientific workflow.

Advances in computing have changed our lives---the Computing Community Consortium aims to help the research community continue that lineage.

There are hundreds of us in academia and industry who consider ourselves FoJ: Friends of Jim. Jim invested so deeply and so uniquely in every one of us that we each felt we must be "the chosen one." And we were: Jim had so much to give that he was able to choose hundreds of us, shaping our careers and our lives.

Computing research has made remarkable advances, but there's much more to be accomplished. The next few decades of advances should be even more significant, and even more interesting, than the past few. The National Science Foundation has created the Computing Community Consortium to engage computing researchers in an ongoing process of visioning -...

Computing research has made remarkable advances, but there's much more to be accomplished. The next few decades of advances should be even more significant, and even more interesting, than the past few. The National Science Foundation has created the Computing Community Consortium to engage computing researchers in an ongoing process of visioning -...

Computing research has made remarkable advances, but there's much more to be accomplished. The next few decades of advances should be even more significant, and even more interesting, than the past few. The National Science Foundation has created the Computing Community Consortium to engage computing researchers in an ongoing process of visioning -...

I have spent the last fifteen years of my life leading an incredible team. Our quest (which we did not even realize in the beginning) was to revolutionize the way computer programming is taught. Current versions of the Alice system (Alice v2.0, and Caitlin ...

Paper plays a crucial role in many developing world information practices. However, paper-based records are inefficient, error-prone and difficult to aggregate. Therefore we need to link paper with the flexibility of online information systems. A mobile phone is the perfect bridging device. Long battery life, connectivity, solid-state memory, low p...

LOOKING is a research effort to identify, synthesize, and assemble existing and emerging concepts and technologies into a coherent, viable cyberinfrastructure design to federate ocean observatories into an integrated knowledge grid. The primary objective is to provide to the Ocean Research and Interactive Ocean Networks (ORION) an initial operation...

Internet worms cause billions of dollars in damage each year. To combat them, researchers have been exploring global worm detection systems to spot a new random scanning worm outbreak quickly. These systems passively listen for worm probes on unused IP addresses, looking for anomalous increases in probe trac to distinguish the emergence of a new wo...

On June 11, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn received computing's highest prize, the A.M. Turing Award, from the Association for Computing Machinery. Their Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), created in 1973, became the language of the Internet.In the May 6 issue of Science [1], we used this as the "news hook" for an invited editorial on the current state o...

The information technology (IT) infrastructure of the United States, which is now vital for communication, commerce, and control of our physical infrastructure, is highly vulnerable to terrorist and criminal attacks. The private sector has an important role in securing the Nation's IT infrastructure by deploying sound security products and adopting...

The proliferation of ocean observatories without internationally agreed-upon standards for instrument/user interfaces and observatory control functions is inhibiting interoperability and utilization of disparate datasets. This is in turn limiting the scientific impact of ocean observatories and increasing their operating costs. Hardware-based stand...

Investments in next-generation facilities to achieve a permanent, interactive telepresence throughout remote or hostile environments can empower a broad spectrum of autonomous sensornet facilities through the NSF Major Research Equipment and Facililties Construction Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). These systems must involve powerful suites of...

The proliferation of ocean observatories in the absence of agreed-upon standards for instrument and user interfaces and observatory control functions will constrain interoperability and cross-linking of disparate datasets. This will in turn limit the scientific impact of ocean observatories and increase their operating costs. Devising hardware-base...

Disciplined concurrent programming can improve the structure and performance of computer programs on both uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems. As a result, support for threads, or lightweight processes, has become a common element of new operating systems and programming languages.

To be widely adopted, location-aware computing must be as effortless, familiar and rewarding as web search tools like Google. We envisage the global scale Place Lab, consisting of an open software base and a community building activity as a way to bootstrap the broad adoption of location-aware computing. The initiative is a laboratory because it wi...

Threads are the vehicle,for concurrency in many approaches to parallel programming. Threads separate the notion of a sequential execution stream from the other aspects of traditional UNIX-like processes, such as address spaces and I/O descriptors. The objective of this separation is to make the expression and control of parallelism sufficiently che...

In Time Warp parallel simulation, a process executes every message as soon as it arrives. If a message with a smaller timestamp subsequently arrives, the process rolls back its state to the time of the earlier message and re-executes from that point.

An abstract is not available.

The appearance of 64-bit address space architectures, such as the DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, and MIPS R4000, signals a radical shift in the amount of address space available to operating systems and applications. This shift provides the opportunity to reexamine fundamental operating system structure specifically, to change the way that operating system...

WebCrawler, the first comprehensive full-text search engine for the World-Wide Web, has played a fundamental role in making the Web easier to use for millions of people. Its invention and subsequent evolution, spanning a three-year period, helped fuel the Webs growth by creating a new way of navigating hypertext. Before search engines like WebCrawl...

Today's high-performance RISC microprocessors have been highly tuned for integer and floating point application performance. These architectures have paid less attention to operating system requirements. At the same time, new operating system designs often have overlooked modern architectural trends which may unavoidably change the relative cost of...

Threads, or "lightweight processes," have become a common and necessary component of new languages and operating systems. Threads allow the programmer or compiler to express, create, and control parallel activities, contributing to the structure and performance of programs.

Microprocessor-based shared-memory multiprocessors are becoming widely available and promise to provide cost-effective high-performance computing. This paper describes a programming system called Amber which permits a single application program to use a homogeneous network of multiprocessors in a uniform way, making the network appear to the applic...

This article explores memory sharing and protection support in Opal, a single-address-space operating system designed for wide-address (64-bit) architectures. Opal threads execute within protection domains in a single shared virtual address space. Sharing is simplified, because addresses are context independent. There is no loss of protection, beca...

this paper, provides safe and efficient communication between address spaces on the same machine without kernel mediation. URPC isolates from one other the three components of interprocess communication: processor reallocation, thread management, and data transfer. Control transfer between address spaces, which is the communication abstraction pres...

Threads are the vehicle for concurrency in many approaches to parallel programming. Threads can be supported either by the operating system kernel or by user-level library code in the application address space, but neither approach has been fully satisfactory. This paper addresses this dilemma. First, we argue that the performance of kernel threads...

New high-speed switched networks have reduced the latency of network page transfers significantly below that of local disk. This trend has led to the development of systems that use network-wide memory, or global memory, as a cache for virtual memory pages or file blocks. A crucial issue in the implementation of these global memory systems is the s...

New high-speed switched networks have reduced the latency of network page transfers significantly below that of local disk. This trend has led to the development of systems that use network-wide memory, or global memory, as a cache for virtual memory pages or file blocks. A crucial issue in the implementation of these global memory systems is the s...

this paper we argue that detailed simulation studies for file and disk systems are often appropriate, and need not be difficult to perform. This paper describes a specific approach that can be used for such detailed simulations. This approach simplifies their execution, broadens their applicability, and increases the accuracy of their results

In this paper, we present a new replica control technique targeted at replicated systems in which write operations update a portion of the information in the data item rather than replacing it entirely. The existing protocols capable of supporting partial writes must either perform the writes on all accessible replicas of the data item, or always a...

This paper presents a new technique for efficiently controlling replicas in distributed systems. Conventional structured coterie protocols are efficient but incur a penalty of reduced availability in exchange for the performance gain. Further, the performance advantage can only be fully realized when write operations always replace the old data ite...

When failures occur during the execution of distributed commit protocols, the protocols may block in some partitions to avoid inconsistent termination of the transaction, thus making data items in these partitions unavailable for accesses. We present a protocol that incorporates two new ideas with the goal of improving data availability. First, a n...

. The paper describes a new dynamic protocol for managing replicated data. Like the existing dynamic schemes, our protocol involves reconfiguring the system dynamically to reflect failures and repairs as they occur, so that the data may be kept available for user operations even if only one replica of the data remains accessible. However, in the ex...

Threads, or "lightweight processes," have become a common and necessary component of new languages and operating systems. Threads allow the programmer or compiler to express, create, and control parallel activities, contributing to the structure and performance of programs. In this article, we discuss the many alternatives that present themselves w...

Advances in processor architecture and technology have resulted in workstations in the 100+ MIPS range. As well, newer local-area networks such as ATM promise a ten- to hundred-fold increase in throughput, much reduced latency, greater scalability, and greatly increased reliability, when compared to current LANs such as Ethernet.

The emergence of a new generation of networks will dramatically increase the attractiveness of loosely-coupled multicomputers based on workstation clusters. The key to achieving high performance in this environment is efficient network access, because the cost of remote access dictates the granularity of parallelism that can be supported. Thus, in...

Careful simulation-based evaluation plays an important role in the design of file and disk systems. We describe here a particular approach to such evaluations that combines techniques in workload synthesis, file system modeling, and detailed disk behavior modeling. Together, these make feasible the detailed simulation of I/O hardware and file syste...

Advances in processor architecture and technology have resulted in workstations in the 100+ MIPS range. As well, newer local-area networks such as ATM promise a ten- to hundred-fold increase in throughput, much reduced latency, greater scalability, and greatly increased reliability, when compared to current LANs such as Ethernet. We believe that th...

Advances in processor architecture and technology have resulted in workstations in the 100+ MIPS range. As well, newer local-area networks such as ATM promise a ten- to hundred-fold increase in throughput, much reduced latency, greater scalability, and greatly increased reliability, when compared to current LANs such as Ethernet. We believe that th...

User-level threads have performance and flexibility advantages over both Unix-like processes and kernel threads. However, the performance of user-level threads may suffer in multiprogrammed environments, or when threads block in the kernel (e.g., for I/O). These problems can be particularly severe in tasks that communicate frequently using IPC (e.g...

Traditionally, network software has been structured in a monolithic fashion with all protocol stacks executing either within the kernel or in a single trusted user-level server. This organization is motivated by performance and security concerns. However, considerations of code maintenance, ease of debugging, customization, and the simultaneous exi...

In Time Warp parallel simulation, the state of each process must be saved (checkpointed) regularly in case a rollback is necessary. Although most existing Time Warp implementations checkpoint after every state transition, this is not necessary, and the checkpoint interval is in reality a tuning parameter of the simulation. Lin and Lazowska[6] propo...

When user-level threads are built on top of traditional kernel threads, they can exhibit poor performance or even incorrect behavior in the face of blocking kernel operations such as I/O, page faults, and processor preemption. This problem can be solved by building user-level threads on top of a new kernel entity, the scheduler activation. The goal...

In a shared-memory multiprocessor system, it may be more efficient to schedule a task on one processor than on another if relevant data already reside in a particular processor's cache. The effects of this type of processor affinity are examined. It is observed that tasks continuously alternate between executing at a processor and releasing this pr...

A read-one write-all (ROWA) protocol for replicated data that allows a system to adjust to failures dynamically in order to keep the data available is proposed. If failures arrive mostly sequentially, the protocol keeps the data available as long as there is at least one operational replica. This is achieved by making the epoch mechanism, previousl...

The recent appearance of architectures with flat 64-bit virtual addressing opens an opportunity to reconsider the way in which operating systems use virtual address spaces. An operating system called Opal is being built for these wide-address architectures. The key feature of Opal is a single global virtual address space that extends to data on lon...

A modification of the tree protocol for distributed mutual exclusion is presented. The existing tree protocol is very efficient as long as all nodes in the system are accessible, but if suffers from performance degradation during the time when some nodes are down or partitioned. Although failures may be infrequent, once a node is down, it may remai...

The recent appearance of architectures with flat 64-bit virtual addressing opens an opportunity to reconsider the way our operating systems use virtual address spaces. We are building an operating system called Opal for these wide-address architectures. The key feature of Opal is a single global virtual address space that extends to data on long-te...

BBFS is a broadband filesystem research effort to support emerging applications that place intense demands on communications, computation, and data storage. Past research often addresses these needs with new special-purpose filesystems, such as transactional ...

The problems associated with developing real-time software systems, including ensuring predictable real-time behavior under both normal and abnormal operating conditions, are outlined. The management of temporal complexity, structuring of dynamic real-time ...

Memory space and processor time are basic resources when executing a program. But beside this implementation aspect (this time resource is necessary but does not belong to the program semantics), the concept of time presents a more fundamental facet ...

Threads are the vehicle for concurrency in many approaches to parallel programming. Threads separate the notion of a sequential execution stream from the other aspects of traditional UNIX-like processes, such as address spaces and I/O descriptors. The objective of this separation is to make the expression and control of parallelism sufficiently che...

Spinning, or busy waiting, is commonly employed in parallel processors when threads of execution must wait for some event, such as synchronization with another thread. Because spinning is purely overhead, it is detrimental to both user response time and system throughput. The effects of two environmental factors, multiprogramming and data-dependent...

Most parallel simulation algorithms (e.g., Chandy and Misra’s algorithm or the Time Warp algorithm) are based on a “space-division” approach. The parallelism of this approach is limited by the causality constraints. Another approach, the “time-division” approach, may provide more parallelism if the time domain is appropriately partitioned. We prese...

The Time Warp “optimistic” approach is one of the most important parallel simulation protocols. Time Warp synchronizes processes via rollback. The original rollback mechanism called lazy cancellation has aroused great interest. This paper studies these rollback mechanisms. The general tradeoffs between aggressive and lazy cancellation are discussed...

Lookahead is the ability of a process to predict its future behavior. The feasibility of implicit lookahead for non-FCFS stochastic queuing systems is demonstrated. Several lookahead exploiting techniques are proposed for round-robin (RR) system simulations. An algorithm that generates lookahead in O (1) time is described. Analytical models and exp...

Initial implementations of parallel programs typically yield disappointing performance. Tuning to improve performance is thus a significant part of the parallel programming process. The effort required to tune a parallel program, and the level of performance that eventually is achieved, both depend heavily on the quality of the instrumentation that...