Abstract

Research into distributed parallelism on “the cloud” has surged lately. As the research agenda and methodology in this area are being established, tendencies towards certain common simplifications and shortcuts employed by researchers can be observed. I provocatively term these “sins”, as they are commonly committed and yet can be threats to the scientific integrity and practical applicability of research. In this talk, I will identify and discuss seven particular “deadly sins”, and present evidence illustrating that they pose real problems. Finally, I will discuss ways for the research community to avoid them in the future.

This is an extended talk based on my HotCloud 2012 paper.

Bio: Malte is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, working on the boundary between operating systems and distributed systems. He is supervised by Steve Hand, and one of the authors of the NSDI 2011 paper on the CIEL universal execution engine for distributed data-flow computing, and currently works on the Firmament project on distributed computing over heterogeneous resources.