Dr. Liqun Cheng gave a presentation which cast a valuable bird's eye view of the tech landscape in hardware and software infrastructures at large scales. His presentation covered work being done by the Google Infrastructure Team. This team is responsible for quite a bit of the hardware, system software, and infrastructure software that supports Google services and applications, many at very large scales.

The broad-ranging talk gave an insight into the Google designs and deployments for systems at worldwide scale. There were startling insights into the tech trends that are bringing out open research challenges for people in the business of developing hardware and software infrastructures. For example, the network capability has been growing much faster than compute as has the volume and rate of data.

The talk concluded with a set of open research topics that should be of great interest to many of us. It also laid out hiring opportunities in their team for these ongoing and forthcoming projects.

[ Zoom recording (MP4) ]