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 computing 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 as well as the Parallelism Group, and I contribute to the Low-Carbon and Sustainable Computing research theme activities. Beyond Glasgow, I co-lead the 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 and contributed to the research activities of the DFG Collaborative Research Center FONDA.

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. I also previously 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 S152
Sir Alwyn Williams Bldg

web

twitter: lauritzthamsen
LinkedIn: lauritzthamsen

news

• 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 proposed degree program amendments to integrate sustainability learning outcomes into our undergraduate programs. Wim summarized our motivation and process 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.