Oberlin College Computer Science

Tom Bressoud, Denison University

Monday April 12, 2010

Computer Science will host Professor Tom Bressoud from Denison University.

The Talk will be held in King 221 at 4:30 Refreshments will be served at 4:00 in King 223.

Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems: Can we Scale to Cloud Computing?

Distributed systems is a subfield of computer science wherein an application or service is modeled as a collection of independently executing processes, cooperating toward a common goal and communicating with each other across some medium (i.e. a network or shared memory).  Fault-tolerance is an area of study that recognizes that computer hardware and software fail and, for many application domains, the failure of a component resulting in a failure of the entire system is simply unacceptable.  So the goal of fault-tolerant systems is to continue to provide correct operation despite the occurrence of component failures.

When we look at the intersection of fault tolerance and distributed systems, the problem becomes even more difficult.  The distribution of processes increases uncertainty, including basic questions such as “knowing” that a component has failed.  And as we scale our distributed systems, we, by definition, increase the number of independent components, and thus can linearly increase the arrival rate of failures.

This talk will explore these issues and look at the scalability issue of fault tolerance in cluster systems and will compare the traditional fault tolerance technique of checkpointing with some newly popular models for cluster-parallel applications — MapReduce, used by Google, and Dryad by Microsoft — each vying for dominance in the currently “hot” area of Cloud Computing.

Computational Thinking Across the Curriculum: The Power and the Peril

by Robert M. Panoff
Shodor Educational Foundation

Place: Craig Lecture Hall

Time & Date: Monday evening, March 15 @ 7:30

Refreshments to follow

Sponsored by the Oberlin Modeling Initiative & Sigma Xi

ABSTRACT: Students and faculty at all education levels are clearly spending much more of their days interacting with computing and communication tools than with each other. Is this good? Are all uses of technology in education helpful, and if not, how does one separate the benefits from the burdens?  We will explore how technology enables dynamic representation in the sciences, arts, and humanities, giving us the opportunity to be more fully human as we seek new knowledge in service to society.

Moving “beyond PowerPointless-ness,” we have the opportunity to demonstrate that effective use of computing really matters. Computing “matters” because quantitative reasoning, computational thinking, and multiscale modeling are the intellectual “heart and soul” of 21st Century science and therefore are the essential skills of the 21st Century workforce.  Computing “matters” because we can apply the power of interactive computing to reach a deeper understanding and of math and science and their role in understanding the world.

We will explore a transformation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education, supported by interactive computing resources, promoting a dynamic encounter with our world through guided discovery. A world-class education requires world-class resources, and all math and science teachers should be able to bring interactive modeling environments to their own teaching practice. We will explore a variety of free and low-cost sources for modeling tools from the Computational Science Education Reference Desk, a pathway project of the National Science Digital Library (http://www.nsdl.org).