The proliferation of data centers, smartphones, personal sensing and tracking devices, and home automation products are fundamentally changing the applications we interact with daily. Today's popular applications are no longer limited to a single desktop computer but now span many mobile devices and cloud servers.

In this talk, I will present three systems that improve the programmability and performance of modern mobile and cloud applications: Sapphire, Diamond, and TAPIR. These systems tackle a new set of application challenges in runtime management, data management, and distributed transactional storage.

Together, they significantly simplify the development of new mobile and cloud applications.

Bio:

Irene Zhang is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Washington. She works with Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy in the Computer Systems Lab. Her current research focuses on systems for large-scale distributed applications, including distributed runtime systems, and transactional storage systems.

Before starting her Ph.D., Irene worked for three years at VMware in the Virtual Machine Monitor Group. She received her B.S and M.Eng. in computer science from MIT, where she worked with Frans Kaashoek in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Lab.