Seattle Conference on Scalability: YouTube Scalability
Google engEDU
53 min – Jun 23, 2007

Google Tech Talks
June 23, 2007

ABSTRACT

This talk will discuss some of the scalability challenges that have
arisen during YouTube’s short but extraordinary history. YouTube
has grown incredibly rapidly despite having had only a handful of
people responsible for scaling the site. Topics of discussion will
include hardware scalability, software scalability, and database
scalability.

Speaker: Cuong Do
Cuong is currently an engineering manager at YouTube/Google.
He was part of the engineering team that scaled the YouTube
software and hardware infrastructure from its infancy to its current
scale. Prior to YouTube/Google, he held various software
development and management positions at PayPal and Inktomi. Read the rest of this entry »

Security is Broken
Google engEDU
1 hr 10 min – Oct 11, 2006

Google Tech Talks
October 11, 2006

Rik Farrow

ABSTRACT
Our computer security model is broken. Worse yet, it never really has worked at all well, and is even less suitable for today’s uses. In this talk, I explore the history behind the design of the current security both in hardware and operating systems. Instead of evolving a more secure model over time, system designers have actually managed to make things worse, creating insecurity in depth. Most of today’s systems are single user machines: certainly desktops and laptops, but also most servers. The current security model was not designed to protect users from themselves, and this goes a long way towards understanding why security is so difficult. I end by looking at strategies for improving security — but no real solutions. The point is to start thinking outside of the box, while adopting best practices today. What we have done in the past has not worked, and can not work. We need to look at the security model in a new way, and that is the real point of this presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

PhotoTechEDU Day 25: Open-source-based high-resolution cameras
Google engEDU
43 min – Aug 10, 2007

Google Tech Talks
August 10, 2007

ABSTRACT

Andrey will explain the designs and applications of Elphel, Inc. intelligent, network-enabled cameras based on open source hardware and software. Google currently uses Elphel cameras for book scanning and for capturing street imagery in Google Maps. Andrey hopes Elphel’s newest modular cameras, the Model 353 camera and the Model 363 camera, will attract software engineers and FPGA hardware engineers interested in exploring high-definition videography and other innovative applications.
# useful properties of light and image formation
# theory and techniques of photographic optics and image capture
# theory of colorimetry and techniques of color reproduction
# where and how photography is being used in Google products and projects
# what tools exist inside Google for photographic image storage, processing, etc.
# and lots more… Read the rest of this entry »

General Purpose, Low Power Supercomputing Using Reconfiguration
Google engEDU
56 min – Feb 28, 2006

Google TechTalks
February 28, 2006

Prof. Bob Brodersen

ABSTRACT:
The ability of FPGA technology to exploit the advances in IC fabrication technology has resulted in the present situation in which a FPGA computing fabric is the most power and area efficient approach for general purpose parallel computing. This has occurred because the Von-Neumann processor architectures are now power limited and can no longer fully exploit the technology advances (thus the move to multi-cores). Hardware composed of arrays of FPGA’s and memory has been design that achieves a TeraOp/second of performance per board with over an order of magnitude higher efficiency for the computation per unit power over conventional microprocessors. To achieve these results, however, requires a high level of parallelism in the application program, which is typically not exposed in sequential programming languages. Even worse for application programmers, has been the low level of abstraction of FPGA hardware, which requires the user to be a hardware expert. It is believed that for any application that can be parallelized and streamed will presently achieve orders of magnitude speed-up for the same power and cost and even more importantly will have a power efficiency which will improve exponentially in each subsequent IC technology node. Read the rest of this entry »

From Nand to Tetris in 12 steps
Google engEDU
1 hr 1 min – Oct 3, 2007

Google Tech Talks
October 10, 2007

ABSTRACT

We describe a new approach and a course that aims to demystify the integrated function of computer systems, using a hands-on approach. The course presents many abstractions, algorithms, and data structures learned in CS courses, and makes them concrete by building a complete computer system from the ground up. In particular, we guide the students through a modular series of projects that gradually construct and unit-test a simple hardware platform and a modern software hierarchy, yielding a surprisingly powerful computer system.

The hardware projects are done in a simple hardware description language and a hardware simulator supplied by us. The software projects (assembler, VM, and a compiler for a simple object-based language) can be done in any language, using the APIs and test programs supplied by us. We also build a mini-OS. The result is a GameBoy-like computer, simulated on the student’s PC. We start the course (and this talk) by demonstrating some video games running on this computer, e.g. Tetris and Pong.

Building a working computer from Nand gates alone is a thrilling intellectual exercise. It demonstrates the supreme power of recursive ascent, and teaches the students that building computer systems is — more than anything else — a triumph of human reasoning. We are able to squeeze all this into a single course since we deal with neither efficiency nor advanced features, leaving these subjects to other courses in the program. The resulting approach is completely self-contained, requiring only programming as a pre-requisite. Hence, courses based on the approach can be given at almost any stage in a CS program. Read the rest of this entry »