Agenda

5:45 - Doors open. Networking. Refreshments.
6:30 - Talk #1: "OpenWhisk on IBM Bluemix" by Ioana Baldini
7:15 - Q&A break
7:30 - Talk #2: "OpenWhisk internals: The action container model" by Philippe Suter
8:15 - Wrap-up.

Talk #1. "OpenWhisk on IBM's Bluemix" by Ioana Baldini

OpenWhisk, a serverless computing platform, is a great way to bringevent-based programming to your microservices architecture. During thistalk, we will go through basic concepts of serverless platforms anddiscuss in more detail the architecture of OpenWhisk. We willconclude with a live demo of using OpenWhisk with IBM's BluemixServices and third-party (even open source!) services.

Talk #2"OpenWhisk internals: The action container model"by Philippe Suter

OpenWhisk supports actions written in JavaScript, Swift, Java and Python. In this talk, we will explore the internals of OpenWhisk to learn how these actions are created, stored, and executed. We will dive into the (internal) specification that makes supporting such a variety of runtimes feasible, and will illustrate it by implementing, as a running example, support for a new language.

About the speakers

Ioana Baldini is a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center,currently working on cloud infrastructure. Her main project isOpenWhisk, an open source serverless computing platform:http://openwhisk.org. This summer, Ioana started a jointproject under the Data for Social Good program at IBM working withMultiple-Sclerosis data.In the past, Ioana worked on different projects ranging from computerarchitecture and runtime systems to application performance andheterogeneous computing platforms with GPUs and FPGAs.Ioana got her PhD from University of Toronto in 2012. During her gradstudies, she interned with IBM Research and Intel Labs. While in gradschool, Ioana obtained several scholarships, including the NSERC CanadaGraduate Scholarship (NERC is the NSF equivalent in Canada), theGoogle Canada Anita Borg Scholarship and the IBM PhD Fellowship.

Philippe Suter is a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson, working on OpenWhisk. His interests lie in high-level programming models that improve developers' experience. He obtained in 2012 a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL), where he worked on formal specification, verification, and synthesis of functional programs.