Google: A Computer Scientist''s Playground (From Systems'' Perspective)

Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet, but it also poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines, from lower-level systems issues like computer architecture, distributed systems, and large-scale parallel computing to applied areas like information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, and user-interface design. In this talk I''ll describe some of the challenges in these areas, discuss some of the interesting applications related to search that Google has developed over the past few years, and highlight some of the behind-the-scenes pieces of infrastructure that we''ve built in order to operate Google''s services. Zoran Dimitrijevic joined Google in 2004 and is currently working in the systems infrastructure group as part of the google distributed file system team. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004 working on real-time storage systems.