Virtualization and the Cost of Indirection | Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture

Some types of virtualization, such as virtual memory, are implemented by providing a layer of indirection between what the program sees and what the system implements. This layer of indirection is typically ignored in theoretical analysis but has a real (and, in some cases, increasing) impact on system performance. In this talk, Martín Farach-Colton will cover a variety of cases where the cost of indirection becomes significant, including new architectures, such as for hardware accelerators and shared memory.

Martín Farach-Colton is the Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU, as well as a distinguished professor emeritus at Rutgers University, where he was on the faculty for 33 years. He is a member of the Argentine National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, and SIAM. He was an early employee at Google and was the cofounder of Tokutek, a performance database company that was acquired in 2014. His work focuses on the theory of randomized data structures and their applications to storage systems.

Refreshments will be served at 3 p.m., before the event.

The Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lectures were created in Fall 2019 to celebrate the role of Simons Institute Founding Director Dick Karp in establishing the field of theoretical computer science, formulating its central problems, and contributing stunning results in the areas of computational complexity and algorithms. Formerly known as the Simons Institute Open Lectures, the series features visionary leaders in the field of theoretical computer science and is geared toward a broad scientific audience.

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