HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF SCIENCE

Department of Computer Science Seminar
2013 Series

Improving High Availability for Cloud Computing

Prof. Zhen Xiao
Department of Computer Science
Peking University

Date: April 23, 2013 (Tuesday)
Time: 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Venue: FSC901E, Fong Shu Chuen Library, Ho Sin Hang Campus

Abstract
Cloud computing has been touted as a solution for “pay as you go” service. But how well does this model really work in practice? What are the security implications for this model? What are some of the underlying challenges? In this talk, I’ll first give some of my personal perspectives on those issues and present an overview of our research work on auto scaling, resource provisioning, and MapReduce optimization in the cloud environment. Then I’ll focus on the fault tolerance and security aspect of cloud computing and discuss how to enable secure, reliable service in virtualized data centers. As we know, reliable service plays an important role in mission critical applications, such as banking systems, stock exchange systems, and air traffic control systems, which cannot tolerate even a few minutes’ downtime. Although service providers have taken great efforts to maintain their services, various failures still occur in data centers.

There are two approaches to high availability: increasing the Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) and decreasing the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). I’ll first present our hot mirroring work which use Hypervisor-based fault tolerance to increase MTTF and then present our work on fast instantiation of application replica to decrease MTTR. I’ll also give an overview of our work on improving the security and dependability of computer software without source code access, which is important to cloud computing security. Finally, I’ll discuss the application of the cloud model on health informatics.

Biography
Zhen Xiao is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Peking University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in January 2001. After that he worked as a senior technical staff member at AT&T Labs – New Jersey and then a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. His research interests include cloud computing, security and high availability, virtualization, and general distributed systems issues. He is a senior member of ACM and IEEE.

********* ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME ***********
(For enquiry, please contact Computer Science Department at 3411 2385)

http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/v1/?page=seminars&id=243&lang=tc
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