07/2026 BIFOLD Colloquium

Data Stream for Heterogeneous System Design

Abstract:

Data streams are commonly used to process data from sensors, instrumentation, time series, etc. They are often seen as the counterpart of batch data processing in conventional relational engines where the data resides in memory and queries are submitted there for processing while, in data streams, the queries are static and it is the data the one flowing through. In this talk Gustavo Alonso will explain the role that data streaming plays in architecture and system design, especially in the context of heterogeneous architectures. He will present the infrastructure his team has been developing over the years to support the design of streaming accelerators for disaggregated architectures: operating systems, network stacks, collective communication primitives, and communication infrastructure. He will then discuss the data processing appliance they are building around this infrastructure, an appliance where streaming plays a key role and is the basis for the engine architecture. As part of the talk, Gustavo Alonso would welcome feedback on overlaps with the design of NebulaStream and how the two efforts could be combined as many of the concepts and ideas behind Nebula can be applied in the context of system architecture.

Short-bio:

Gustavo Alonso is a professor in the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich where he is a member of the Systems Group (www.systems.ethz.ch) and the head of the Institute of Computing Platforms. He leads the AMD-ETHZ HACC (Heterogeneous Accelerated Compute Cluster) deployment at ETH (https://github.com/fpgasystems/hacc), with several hundred users worldwide, a research facility that supports exploring data center hardware-software co-design. His research interests include data management, cloud computing architecture, hardware acceleration for data science, and building systems on modern hardware.
Gustavo holds degrees in telecommunication from the Madrid Technical University and an MS and PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara. Before joining ETH, he was a research scientist at IBM Almaden in San Jose, California. His research has led to 4 Test-of-Time Awards in databases, software runtimes, middleware, and mobile computing. Gustavo is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Computer Science of UC Santa Barbara, and a recipient of the Lifetime Achievements Award from the European Chapter of ACM SIGOPS (EuroSys).