COMPUTER SYSTEMS

PI:   Nuno Preguiça

• The Computer Systems Group research focuses on making the systems that surround us in our daily lives more reliable, trustworthy, dependable, and better performing.
  
  Society is now essentially dependent on services offered by computer systems, from e-commerce and social networks, to health care and scientific applications. On the server side, applications run on geo-distributed cloud infrastructures with thousands of servers, each with tens of processors. The cloud is expanding towards the edge, with a myriad of points of presence closer to clients. Clients include a growing number of mobile devices and things connect among them and to servers. Taming the inherent complexity of developing systems that run continuously, securely and correctly in this setting is more challenging than ever, and involves the convergence of various disciplines.
• The CS group is addressing these challenges by working on several problems in the broad area of computer systems, focusing on the following main areas: data management, security, data processing and concurrent and parallel computing.
  
  Examples of problems being addressed include finding principled approaches for developing geo-replicated systems; enforcing privacy for data stored in public clouds; process geo-distributed data; devising new abstractions and runtimes for exploring the parallelism of modern computer systems, including addressing domain-specific problems (e.g. materials and biomedical sciences).
  
  Contributions of group members to data dissemination and data management have been adopted by industry and are running in cloud-based production systems serving millions of users worldwide. The CS group has been publishing at top conferences and journals such as CACM, EuroSys, VLDB, WWW, ICDCS, ATC, Middleware, DSN, JCSS, MONET, and participates in funded EU research projects and networks, national research projects and collaborations with industry.