Infrastructure at Google: Free talk by Dr Peter Dickman of Google

24 Nov 2010

On Friday 3 December (1-2pm) in Lecture Theatre A, University Place

Google famously builds systems that must scale enormously, handling vast quantities of data, offering a worldwide user base very rapid responses to searches, and providing support for large-scale cloud-based apps such as GMail and YouTube.

In this talk, Peter Dickman will provide an insight into the infrastructure and software systems that make Google possible, and briefly show how the company culture and software engineering ethos have contributed to Google's technical success. He will provide a rapid overview of Google's infrastructure from data centres and server design through the OS and software stack to Google's approach to software engineering and their engineering-led corporate culture, all presented from the perspective of wanting to do computing at global scales.

The talk is designed to be accessible to a wide audience, from undergraduate Computer Science students to post-docs, experienced practitioners and academics.

Dr Peter Dickman is an Engineering Manager in Google's Zurich office, leading development projects related to websearch and user data privacy. He joined Google in 2008, having spent the previous 1.5 decades as an academic at the University of Glasgow, where his teaching and research focussed on distributed systems and related topics.