John Wilkes
Location: (Mountain View, CA)
Personal Research Web Page: http://www.e-wilkes.com/john
Keywords: SLAs, service level agreements, autonomics, self-management, large-scale systems, storage, self-healing, self-*, cloud computing
Posted on: Friday, June 5th, 2009
Broad Research Area: Networks / Operating Systems, Numerical/Scientific Computing / HPC / Data-Intensive Scalable Computing
Research Interests:
I have broad interests in making systems more capable of managing themselves. In particular, I’m looking to collaborate on using SLAs (Service Level Agreements) to improve our ability to delegate control to automated decision-making systems that are faced with trade-offs. This work includes the areas of control mechanisms, control systems, feedback loops, and economics – SLAs need a way to specify the consequences of meeting/not meeting their objectives, and economic feedback mechanisms seem a particularly powerful way to achieve this. I’m also interested in techniques needed to foster people’s trust in the capabilities and behavior of such systems.
Google provides a great many really exciting opportunities to try these ideas out at significant scale, on real production systems, with real-world problems and requirements. It’s an ideal proving ground for real systems work in support of a wide range of uses, including cloud computing.
