Kate Keahey, a senior computer scientist in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, has been named this year’s winner of the 2019 IEEE Women in Services Computing Award.
Services computing is a cross-disciplinary area that bridges the gap between business and IT services; its’ scope includes web services, cloud computing, enabling infrastructures, and applications using Web services.
The award, presented by the IEEE Technical Committee on Services Computing (TCSVC), recognizes Keahey’s technical contributions in the area of cloud computing and her leadership in providing services to the scientific computing community.
One of Keahey’s early innovations was the idea of having user-defined environments, or “workspaces” implemented as virtual machines, overlaid on top of remote resources, a concept known today as Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud computing. Under hear leadership, her team developed Nimbus, an early open source implementation of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, released in production a year ahead of Amazon’s commercial EC2 platform.
Recently Keahey has been leading the Chameleon project, an experimental testbed for cloud computing research. Chameleon is a highly reconfigurable resource that allows users to customize resources at bare metal level to support research in operating systems, virtualization, power management, or software-defined networking. This bold new platform became the first community resource where computer scientists could build new cloud and virtualization technologies and test them at scale. Unlike previous Computer Science testbed resources, Chameleon has been configured using largely an adaptation of OpenStack, a mainstream open sources IaaS platform, thus both demonstrating that testbeds can be configured using mainstream software tools and extending the capabilities available through the platform.
“I am honored to receive this award,” Keahey said. “We have only scratched the surface in exploring the potential of infrastructure clouds; the increased need for control together with understanding how to manage incentives associated with such control has the potential to make cloud computing into a more useful tool than it already is. Most important, as we demonstrated with Chameleon, cloud computing concepts align well with the idea of creating a common digital research platform, a resource that scientists can use easily publish, share, and reuse complex digital artifacts enabling them to more efficiently build on each other’s research.”
Keahey also has consistently dedicated an important fraction of her time serving the community. She currently is on the advisory boards of three national and international projects: NanoHUB, an online nanotechnology resource; Jetstream, a national science and engineering cloud-based on-demand system; and the European Open Science Cloud, for research data in Europe. She is an associate editor on several editorial boards of journals in distributed and cloud computing. She is cofounder of the SoftwareX journal, which won the PROSE award for innovation in journal publishing in 2016. Moreover, she has given many invited presentations, including the keynote talk “At the Crossroads of HPC and Big Data” at IEEE CLUSTER 2017.
Keahey will receive this year’s IEEE TCSCV Women in Services Computing Award at the IEEE SERVICES 2019 conference in Milan, Italy, July 8–13, 2019.
For more information about the IEEE Technical Committee on Services Computing, see the website: https://conferences.computer.org/services/2019/