Massivizing Computer Systems: VU on the Science, Design, and

Engineering of Distributed Systems and Ecosystems

∗

Alexandru Iosup

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Keywords:

Massivizing Computer Systems, Computer Ecosystems, Distributed Ecosystems, Performance, Sustainability,

Energy-Awareness, Scalability and Elasticity, Computing Continuum, Measurement, Analysis, Real-World

Experimentation, Simulation, Digital Twin.

1 EXTENDED ABSTRACT

Wherever we look, our society is turning digital. Sci-

ence and engineering, business-critical and economic

operations, and online education and gaming rely in-

creasingly on the effective digitalization of their pro-

cesses. For digitalization to succeed, societal pro-

cesses must leverage efﬁcient computer systems, ef-

fectively and efﬁciently integrated into larger ecosys-

tems, managed primarily without application devel-

oper and even client input. However successful un-

til now, we cannot take these ecosystems for granted:

the core does not yet rely on sound principles of sci-

ence and design, and there are warning signs about the

scalability, dependability, and sustainability of engi-

neered operations. This is the challenge of massiviz-

ing computer systems.

In this talk, inspired by this challenge and by

our experience with distributed computer systems for

over 15 years, we focus on understanding, deploying,

scaling, and evolving computer ecosystems success-

fully. We posit we can achieve this through an ambi-

tious, comprehensive research program, which starts

from the idea that we can address the grand, funda-

mental challenge by focusing on computer ecosys-

tems rather than merely on (individual, small-scale)

computer systems. To this end, we deﬁne (dis-

tributed) computer ecosystems and differentiate them

from (distributed) computer systems. We formulate

principles and introduce a reference architecture for

computer ecosystems supporting diverse workloads -

AI/ML, big data and graph processing, online gam-

ing and metaverse, and business-critical and server-

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8030-9398

∗

Alexandru Iosup and the AtLarge team

less - and diverse resources and back-end services

across the computing continuum. We synthesize a

framework of resource management and scheduling

(RM&S) techniques, which we argue should be ex-

plored systematically in the next decade. We show

early results obtained experimentally, through con-

trolled real-world experiments, long-term observa-

tion, and what-if analysis of short- and long-term sce-

narios using the OpenDC digital twin for datacenters.

This vision aligns with the Manifesto on Com-

puter Systems and Networking Research in the

Netherlands (Iosup et al., 2022), which the speaker

co-leads. Many of our examples come from real-

world prototyping and experimentation, grand experi-

ments in computer systems, and/or benchmarking and

performance analysis work conducted with the Cloud

group of SPEC RG (SPEC RG Cloud Group, 2020).

This is a call to the entire community: there is

much to discover and achieve, and to get meaning-

ful, long-lasting results we need to form a community

spanning distributed systems, performance engineer-

ing, software engineering, and more. We also need to

train the next generation of ethical professionals.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

Dr.ir. Alexandru Iosup is a full professor at Vrije

Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), a high-quality research

university in the Netherlands. He chairs the Massiviz-

ing Computer Systems research group at the VU and

is a visiting researcher at TU Delft. He is also elected

chair of the SPEC-RG Cloud Group. His work in

distributed systems and ecosystems led to high scien-

tiﬁc impact, with applications in cloud computing, big

data, scientiﬁc and business-critical computing, and

Iosup, A.

Massivizing Computer Systems: VU on the Science, Design, and Engineering of Distributed Systems and Ecosystems.

DOI: 10.5220/0012068600003488

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2023), pages 7-8

ISBN: 978-989-758-650-7; ISSN: 2184-5042

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

online gaming and the metaverse. His research has re-

ceived prestigious recognition, including membership

in the (Young) Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences

of the Netherlands, the Netherlands ICT Researcher

of the Year award, and a Ph.D. from TU Delft. His

leadership and innovation in education led to various

awards, including the prestigious Netherlands Higher

Education Teacher of the Year. He received a knight-

hood for cultural and scientiﬁc merits.

FUNDING ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work is co-funded by the projects NWO Top2

OffSense, EU H2020 GraphMassivizer, and EU

MCSA-RISE CLOUDSTARS.

REFERENCES

Iosup, A., Kuipers, F., Varbanescu, A. L., Grosso, P.,

Trivedi, A., Rellermeyer, J. S., Wang, L., Uta, A., and

Regazzoni, F. (2022). Future computer systems and

networking research in the netherlands: A manifesto.

CoRR, abs/2206.03259.

SPEC RG Cloud Group (2020). SPEC RG Cloud Group

webpage. https://research.spec.org/working-groups/

rg-cloud/. Accessed: 2023-03-08.

CLOSER 2023 - 13th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science