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Fall 2007

October

5-7: Geek-A-Thon at Centennial Campus Middle School

September

19: Google Event

Google is coming to meet and socialize with WiCS between 3pm and 4pm on Wednesday, September 19 @ 3001 EBII. This is a great chance to meet with a large company's representatives in a comfortable, informal environment. Snacks from Neomonde will be provided by Google. You can RSVP for the event here.

August

28: Welcome Back Bash/Cookout

Join us on August 28th, 2007 for our Welcome Back Bash! To kick off the new school year, the student organizations of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Material Science and Chemical Engineering are coming together to welcome students to Centennial Campus and get word out about the many great student organizations here at NC State. Come out and join us for free food and fun!

Tuesday, August 28th, 6:00-8:00 pm in the EB-II Atrium/Oval/Breezeway
Sponsored by Norfolk Southern

Spring 2007

April

11: Celebration of Gender Diversity - 2-4pm in EBII Atrium
12: CRA-W Distinguished Lecture - Monica Lam from Standford - 11am in EBII 3211
12: CRA-W Sponsored Panel - Dinner Reception @ 5:30 and Panel @ 6:30 in EBII 3211
13: CRA-W Distinguished Lecture - Xiaohui (Helen) Gu from IBM T. J. Watson Research Center - 10am in EBII 3211

Fall 2006

December

4: WICS Lecturer

Performance Impacts of Autocorrelation in Systems
Evgenia Smirni
College of William and Mary
http://www.cs.wm.edu/~esmirni/

Schedule

10:00 - Breakfast reception in EBII, Room 3211
10:30 - Lecture in EBII, Room 3211
12:00 - WICS Luncheon with Dr. Smirni, location TBD

Abstract

Correlated arrival processes in Internet servers is routinely observed via measurements. In this talk, we focus on systems with correlation in their arrival and/or service processes and on the impact of autocorrelation on system performance. We consider (a) systems with finite buffers (e.g., systems with admission control that effectively operate as closed systems ) and (b) systems with infinite buffers (i.e., systems that operate as open systems). We present experimental measurements that show how autocorrelation in the arrival/service process propagates into the system and affects end-to-end performance. We also illustrate how knowledge of autocorrelation can assist in the development of resource allocation policies.

For the case of finite buffer systems, we use measurements from a 3-tier e-commerce server under the TPC-W workload and show the presence and propagation of autocorrelated flows in all tiers of the system, despite the fact that the stochastic processes used to generate this session-based workload are independent. We attribute this effect to the existence of autocorrelation in the service process of one of the tiers. In contrast to systems with independent flows, autocorrelation in the service process may result in very high user system response times despite the fact that bottleneck resources are not highly utilized, and measured throughput and device utilization levels are modest. This, falsely indicates that the system can sustain higher capacities. We present a small queuing network that helps us understand the above counter-intuitive behavior.

For a system with infinite buffer size, we consider the problem of load balancing in homogeneous cluster environments admitting jobs with high variability in their execution times. Load balancing in such environment has been shown to heavily depend on the policy's ability to direct jobs to servers according to the job size. The effectiveness of such policies is based on separating 'short' from 'long' jobs, by avoiding having short jobs waiting behind long jobs for service. We show that performance improvements due to this separation quickly vanishes if there the job arrival process to the cluster is autocorrelated. Based on this fact, we devise a new size-based policy (i.e., jobs are still directed to different servers according to their size) but all servers are not equally utilized so that the performance loss due to autocorrelated arrival flows is minimized.

SHORT BIO:
Evgenia Smirni is the William and Martha Claiborne Stephens Associate Professor at the College of William and Mary, Department of Computer Science, Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-8795 ( esmirni@cs.wm.edu ). She received her Diploma in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the University of Patras, Greece, in 1987, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University in 1993 and 1995, respectively. From August 1995 to June 1997 she had a postdoctoral research associate position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include analytic modeling, stochastic models, Markov chains, matrix analytic methods, resource allocation policies, Internet systems, workload characterization, and modeling of distributed systems and applications. She has served as program co-chair of QEST'05 and of ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance'06. She is a member of ACM, IEEE, and the Technical Chamber of Greece.

September

6: WICS Lunch - Planning 2005-2006 activities - EBII Room 2295 - 11:30am - 1:30pm
20: WICS Lunch - Planning 2005-2006 activities - EBII Room 3300 - 11:30am - 1:30pm
29: Women in Grad School Welcome Event - EBII Room 3002- 3:30pm - 5:30pm

Spring 2006

January

20: WICS Lunch - Planning CSC 116 Seminar - EBII Room 3300 - 11:00am - 1:00pm
27: WICS Lunch - Planning CSC 116 Seminar - EBII Room 3300 - 11:00am - 1:00pm

February

4: CSC 116 Seminar - TBD - 10:00am - 1:00pm

Fall 2005

September

1: WICS Lunch - Ventures I Conference Room from 11:30am - 1:15pm
29: WICS Lunch with Credit Suisse First Boston - Partners II, Room 3002 [MAP] from 11:00am - 1:00 pm
Credit Suisse First Boston is interested in talking about employment opportunities with their company. They have recently come to the Triangle, but have offices in 33 countries and 5 continents. Part of the meeting will discuss working in an IT career in a non-traditional/non-IT company. Bring your resume!

October

11: WICS Lunch - Ventures I Conference Room from 11:30am - 1:15 pm

Facilitator: Kristy Boyer

Project 1: Create an algorithms module for Engineering 101 to help motivate and give students a perspective on the study of computer science.

Project 2: When our CSC majors take their first programming course, many of them haven't programmed before and can be intimidated by the environment of that first class. New students, especially women, can be disheartened by being thrown into the subject suddenly surrounded by people who claim programming is the easiest thing they've ever done. A one-day seminar, prior to them beginning the course, could motivate, give perspective, and introduce some environments that would otherwise be foreign to them. It could also be a place for them to meet sources of help and support in the form of mentors and classmates.

November

15: WICS Lunch - Monteith (EGRC) 463 from 11:30am - 1:15 pm

Facilitator: Kristy Boyer

When our CSC majors take their first programming course, many of them haven't programmed before and can be intimidated by the environment of that first class. New students, especially women, can be disheartened by being thrown into the subject suddenly surrounded by people who claim programming is the easiest thing they've ever done. A one-day seminar, prior to them beginning the course, could motivate, give perspective, and introduce some environments that would otherwise be foreign to them. It could also be a place for them to meet sources of help and support in the form of mentors and classmates.

Spring 2005

March

22: WICS Lunch - WI 214 from 11:00am - 1:00pm Special guest: Dr. Laura Bottomley

April

2: COE Open House 9:00am - 1:00pm
13: WICS Lunch - WI 214 from 11:00 am - 1:00pm Special guest: Dr. Laurie Williams
26: WICS Panel - EGRC 136 from 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Panel Members:
- Carla Ellis - Duke University
- Yuanyuan Zhou - UIUC
- Annie Antón - NCSU
- Kristen Balhoff - IBM
- Kera Bell - NCSU Graduate Student

Fall 2004

September:

3: WICS Lunch - WI 214 from 11:00am - 1:00pm
9: CSC Student Organizations' Kick-off Event
17: WICS Lunch - WI 214 from 11:00am - 12:45 pm

October:

1: WICS Lunch - WI 214 from 12:00 - 2:00pm

Ken Curtis from GE Mortgage Insurance Corporation (a unit of Genworth Financial) will be coming in to do a session on interview/resume tips, and a resume critique! They will be conducting on-campus interviews (see ePack for more details and to register for an interview.) Bring your resume!

15: WICS Lunch - WI 214 from 12:00 - 2:00pm

CANCELED

29: WICS Lunch - WI 402A from 12:00 - 2:00pm

Topic: TBA