Abstract: This talk will present techniques for improving performance and availability of transaction-based applications which typically have Web front ends. While static Web content can generally be served at high rates, many of the real challenges occur in serving dynamic data requiring considerable back-end processing. The most significant bottleneck is often due to I/O and not to CPU limitations. While database management systems are commonly used, the overhead for many commonly used databases is significant. This talk will examine why this is the case and suggest methods for alleviating the problem.

For many commercial transaction processing systems, high availability is critically important. The talk will discuss techniques for achieving high availability and reducing recovery times after failures. Having multiple geographically distributed sites is one technique for achieving ability. This introduces problems in maintaining consistency between the various sites. The talk will present techniques for maintaining consistency among geographically distributed sites.

Short Bio: Arun Iyengar does research and development into Web performance, distributed computing, and service-oriented architectures at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. His work has been incorporated into products by several companies including IBM, HP, and Microsoft and has improved performance at many Web sites providing significant dynamic content. Arun is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on the Web, an executive committee member (and former Chair) of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on the Internet, Founding Chair of IFIP Working Group 6.4 on Internet Applications Engineering, the IEEE Computer Society representative to IFIP Technical Committee 6 on Communication Systems, an IBM Master Inventor, and Co-Chair of IBM's Distributed and Fault-Tolerant Professional Interest Community. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Program Vice Chair for Performance, Scalability, and Availability for WWW2008.