OCS Seminars
Avi Barliya: The Future of Computing
Computing power and capability have changed dramatically in the last few decades. As highly complex computing becomes increasingly commonplace throughout industry and research, the ability to outsource infrastructure becomes cost-effective. So-called ‘serverless computing’ takes cloud services one step further by transferring day-to-day server-maintenance out of the hands of consumers. Dr. Avi Barliya discussed the technical challenges and benefits of this new computing model.
Abstract:
The demand for computing power is increasing exponentially. Computing is key for research institutes to make progress, however, with time, computing has become more complex and costly to manage. Researchers and developers often do not have the skills required to build and maintain their computing clusters and infrastructure. Thus, they find themselves trying to manage things by themselves, leading to inefficient solutions and wasting precious time instead of spending it on their research. Alternatively, they turn to IT/Devops people, who are often understaffed.
At this point comes serverless computing, a rather new computing architecture that enables the researchers to focus only on their research and code, while the entire infrastructure is abstracted away from them. In this talk, Dr. Avi Barliya briefly reviewed how computing has evolved to this point and how serverless is solving many problems. He discussed some of the open remaining problems and how we can approach to solve them.
Biography:
Avi Barliya got his Ph.D. in computer science and mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he focused on computational motor control studying how the brain perceives, plans and executes movement. He then joined Primesense and used his expertise in the development of the 3D sensor Kinect. Following that, Avi joined SpaceIL and led the attitude & orbit control systems (AOCS) group for the first private spacecraft sent to the Moon. Additionally, he was a co-founder of an autonomous driving startup. Today, Avi is the founder of Dis.co, where he dreams to build more accessible and efficient computing by harnessing the power of underutilized computing power.
