Dr. Lauritz Thamsen | University of Glasgow | Systems
I am a Lecturer in Computer Systems in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. I am generally passionate about making computing more efficient, resilient, and sustainable. To this end, I work on methods and tools that make it easier to create resource-efficient and reliable distributed computer systems, for example through adaptive resource management and carbon-aware computing. A particular focus is on data-intensive applications (e.g. data analytics, scientific workflows, AI/ML) running on cloud or edge infrastructure. At Glasgow, I lead the Carbon-Conscious Computing Lab, I am a member of the Systems Section, and I contribute to the Low-Carbon and Sustainable Computing theme. Beyond Glasgow, I co-lead a research collaboration on Adaptive Resource Management with TU Berlin.
Previously, I was a senior researcher in the Distributed and Operating Systems group at TU Berlin, where I drove the research on Adaptive Resource Management with a team of PhD students and lectured on Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems. At the same time, I also collaborated closely with the Operating Systems and Middleware group at Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), mainly on Distributed Systems Engineering. In addition, I was a guest professor in the Knowledge Management group and the Department of Computer Science at HU Berlin, where I lectured on Data-Intensive Systems, contributed to the research activities of the DFG Collaborative Research Center FONDA, and substituted for Ulf Leser.
I got my PhD from TU Berlin, working on dynamic resource allocation for distributed dataflows in the BMBF-funded Berlin Big Data Center and the DFG Research Unit Stratosphere under Odej Kao. Before that, I was part of the Software Architecture Group of Robert Hirschfeld and the Research School at HPI. Furthermore, I have worked at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, California, in the Technology Infrastructure Practice group, under Dan Ingalls, and at Signavio in Berlin.
contact
lauritz.thamsen at glasgow.ac.uk+44 141 330 2000 (x0652)
office
Room S152Sir Alwyn Williams Bldg
news
- May 2025: I won the Early-Career Teaching Excellence Award of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Glasgow for my day-to-day teaching dedication, delivering three Computer Systems course components, and several recent teaching-focused collaborative initiatives with colleagues and students.
- April 2025: The recordings from LOCO 2024 are online and we are calling for bids to organize the 2nd edition.
- April 2025: The 3rd edition of our TDIS workshop, held with EuroSys and ASPLOS 2025, was attended by more than 20 participants. Our program included five accepted paper presentations as well as two keynote talks (by Dr. Thaleia Dimitra Doudali and Dr. Harm Griffioen). All papers are available open access in ACM's library.
- March 2025: We will present three research papers at IEEE CCGrid 2025: a full paper on Flora, another full paper on WOW, and a short paper on carbon-aware workflow execution.
- February 2025: Our new EPSRC-funded project on Carbon-Aware Scalable Processing in Elastic Clusters (Casper) has started. The partners of the project are AWS, BBC, and HU Berlin.
- January 2025: We are organizing the 3rd International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS 2025), to take place together with EuroSys and ASPLOS in Rotterdam on March 31, 2025.
- November 2024: We were able to accept 21 regular submissions for the 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO 2024) and look forward to a full-day workshop in Glasgow and online on December 3, 2024.
- October 2024: My EPSRC New Investigator Award application was accepted and I am receiving funding to work on Carbon-Aware Scalable Processing in Elastic Clusters (Casper) at Glasgow.
- October 2024: Glasgow's new diversity-led, mission-driven Center for Doctoral Training DiveIn has launched and I am happy to be part of the supervisor possibilities catalogue in the priority areas AI, Big Data, and Beyond Net Zero.
- September 2024: We are in the news, with The Herald Scotland, FutureScot, and Times Higher Education reporting on our sustainability-focused changes to our undergraduate programs in Computing Science and Software Engineering.
- August 2024: We will be teaching a new advanced course on scalable and sustainable Cloud Systems at Glasgow in the upcoming academic year. It will be the first advanced course with a strong focus on sustainable computing offered by our School (and may also be the first Cloud Computing course in the UK with a strong focus on sustainability).
- August 2024: We are organizing the 1st International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing (LOCO 2024) to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in low carbon and sustainable computing on December 3, 2024.
- July 2024: Kathleen West's poster on our work on Carbon-Aware Workflow Execution won the Best Poster Award at the SICSA 2024 PhD Conference at Aberdeen Uni.
- May 2024: We presented work on auto-tuning DSP systems and carbon-aware workflow execution at the Scottish Autonomous Networked Systems (SANS 2024) workshop.
- April 2024: Wim Vanderbauwhede and I successfully proposed new sustainability learning outcomes for our undergraduate programs in Computing Science and Software Engineering. Wim summarized our motivation and approach in a short blog post.
- April 2024: I presented our work on carbon-aware edge/cloud computing at the HPI Research Symposium 2024 at Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam.
- March 2023: Interested in doing your PhD in Computing Science at Glasgow? Passionate about cloud, ML/AI, and sustainability? We are looking for a PhD student for an exciting PhD project with Barclays.
- November 2023: Our paper on a low-carbon federated learning system, which operates exclusively on renewable excess energy and spare compute capacity, was accepted at ACM e-Energy 2024.
- October 2023: Kathleen West started as the first PhD student of my lab, working with me and Yehia Elkhatib on the carbon-aware execution of scientific workflows.
- October 2023: Our special issue on Benchmarking, Experimentation Tools, and Reproducible Practices for Data‐Intensive Systems from Edge to Cloud was published in Wiley's Software: Practice and Experience journal.
- August 2023: I joined the School of Computing Science's EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) committee.
- July 2023: I spoke at a Cardiff University workshop on Flexible and Zero Carbon Energy Systems for Data Centers, summarizing related work of ours (#1, #2, #3).
- May 2023: I have completed my term on our Student Conduct Team and have moved on to be my School's Sustainability Subject Adviser.
- February 2023: I presented some of our recent work on carbon-aware scheduling for flexible cloud and edge workloads at the University of Kent. [slides]
- January 2023: HU Berlin's Ulf Leser and I wrote a post on The Elephant in the Data Center – Energy Consumption of Workflow Executions for the Workflows Community Initiative.
- November 2022: The final project I developed as a senior researcher in Odej Kao's group at TU Berlin – an individual research grant to the DFG on Collaborative and Cross-Context Cluster Configuration for Distributed Data-Parallel Processing – has been accepted. The project will run for three years, sustaining our close collaboration to 2026.
- September 2022: The program for our 2nd TDIS Workshop has been completed with two invited talks by Dr. Ehsan K. Ardestani (Meta) and Dr. Tian Guo (WPI).
- September 2022: Dr. Angelos Marnerides and I have started to teach the basics of Networking and Operating Systems ("NOSE2") to around 280 undergrad students at the University of Glasgow.
- August 2022: We were able to accept several interesting papers for our 2nd International Workshop on Testing Distributed Internet of Things Systems (TDIS) at IEEE IC2E 2022.
- August 2022: I helped organize the 28th International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par) as local chair. In addition, we presented a full paper on "Renewable-Aware Admission Control for Delay-Tolerant Cloud and Edge Workloads".
- July 2022: I gave a talk on "Adaptive Resource Allocation for (Bioinformatics-)Workflows" in the July event of the Glasgow Computational Biology Community, presenting recent results of the DFG CRC FONDA. [slides]
- July 2022: Our paper "Phoebe: QoS-Aware Distributed Stream Processing Through Anticipating Dynamic Workloads" won the Best Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE International Conference On Web Services (ICWS).
- July 2022: Together with Jossekin Beilharz from Hasso Plattner Institute, I gave a guest lecture on "IoT Systems for Critical Urban Infrastructures" in the lecture series of the European teaching network ide3a, presenting ongoing research projects and our idea for an IoT testing framework.
- April 2022: I pitched my research focus in a 5-minute "Zoomposium" talk to the College of Science and Engineering of the University of Glasgow. [slides] [recording]
- March 2022: I gave a research lecture in our new seminar series on Low-Carbon and Sustainable Computing, presenting recent work on „Scheduling and Placement for Low-Carbon Edge/Cloud Computing“. [slides] [recording]
- March 2022: I started as a new Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. As such, I am looking for research students and collaborators in the area of resource-efficient and resilient computing systems.
- February 2022: I successfully wrapped up my guest professorship at HU Berlin, where I substituted for Ulf Leser in the Department of Computer Science in the context of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center FONDA, teaching two new courses on Data-Intensive Systems.
collaborations
- Academic and industry collaborations: If you are interested in making distributed computer systems more efficient and sustainable with me, let me know.
- Student and project supervision: I am always looking to work with motivated research students. Please have a look here and get in touch.
- Community service: I am available for scientific community service in areas such as edge and cloud computing, data-intensive systems, and sustainable computing.