Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

4:30 PM, Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Shriram Center for Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering Room 104
http://ee380.stanford.edu

The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer

Bryan Cantrill, CTO
Oxide Computer

While our software systems have become increasingly elastic, the physical substrate available to run that software (that is, the computer!) has remained stuck in a bygone era of PC architecture. Hyperscale infrastructure providers have long since figured this out, building machines that are fit to purpose -- but those advances have been denied to the mass market. In this talk, we will talk about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine -- and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision.

Video:

To access the live webcast of the talk (active at 16:28 of the day of the presentation) and the archived version of the talk, use the URL SU-EE380-20200226. This is a first class reference and can be transmitted by email, Twitter, etc.

A URL referencing a YouTube view of the lecture will be posted HERE a week or so following the presentation.

About the Speaker:

[speaker photo] Bryan M. Cantrill (born 1973) is CTO at Oxide Computer Company. Bryan worked at Sun Microsystems and later at Oracle Corporation following its acquisition of Sun. He left Oracle on July 2010 to become the Vice President of Engineering at Joyent, transitioning to Chief Technology Officer in April of 2014, until his departure at the end of July in 2019.

In 2005 Bryan Cantrill was named one of the 35 Top Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT's magazine. In 2008, Cantrill, Mike Shapiro and Adam Leventhal were recognized with the USENIX Software Tools User Group (STUG) award for "the provision of a significant enabling technology." He is a past member of the ACM Queue Editorial Board.