How to have a research career in industry Rebecca Isaacs, Research - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

How to have a research career in industry Rebecca Isaacs, Research Scientist at Google SOSP Diversity Workshop October 28, 2017 These are my personal opinions and not necessarily those of my employer 1

Outline 1. The state of systems research in industry 2. How do we do research in my group at Google? 3. Ways to succeed 4. Program committees and other forms of public service 2

Who is this talk for? ● Students considering career choices ● Academics considering a switch to industry Sabbaticals can be a great way to test the water ○ ● The sceptics who don’t believe research gets done in industry 3

In the golden days of industry research labs... “Zen and the Art of Research Management”, Naughton & Taylor 6. Do not pay too much attention to relevance, deliverables and other concepts beloved of Senior Management. 7. Remember that creative people are like hearts - they go where they are appreciated. They can be inspired or led, but not managed. 4

Systems research today at Google “Google’s Hybrid Approach to Research”, Spector et al. The goal of research at Google is to bring significant, practical benefits to our users, and to do so rapidly, within a few years at most. Because of the time-frame and effort involved, Google’s approach to research is iterative and usually involves writing production, or near-production, code from day one. 5

A few influential systems from the research labs ● The Alto, Ethernet, Grapevine (Xerox PARC) ● The Firefly, early cache coherence protocols, AltaVista, Paxos, Autonet, Practical RISC, DCPI (DEC SRC/WRL) ● MSR: Differential privacy, HoloLens, Singularity, Dryad/DryadLINQ ● … and many more... 6

A few influential systems from Google ● MapReduce ● The Google file system ● Bigtable ● Spanner ● TensorFlow ● and many more 7

Different… but similar ● Both approaches have produced great research ● The employer recognizes and carries the risk True innovation can - and should sometimes - fail ○ ● The importance of the PhD pipeline and academic research is recognized 8

Why choose an industrial research career? ● Impact Your ideas, your designs, your code can change the ○ world… literally ● Real problems and real data Interesting and intellectually challenging ○ ● Career path flexibility SWE, SRE, PM, management, ... ○ 9

Another view researcher defining the abstractions, designing the protocol, analyzing the algorithm making the system work… in production… at scale 10

Another view researcher defining the abstractions, designing the protocol, analyzing the algorithm making the system work… in production… at scale 11

Comparing research styles (slightly tongue-in-cheek) Industry Academia Collaboration Large teams Small number of PIs, students, cross-disciplinary opportunities Multiple stakeholders, may “Us vs the world” Politics have competing goals Motivation Solve a specific problem, eg Apply a tasteful solution to an improve user experience, or intellectually pleasing problem / reduce memory footprint follow the funding Environment Constrained implementation Flexible (but must be cheap) / and deployment options dictated by funding Evaluation By experience, likely at scale Micro-benchmarks, synthetic or limited real-world data Impact, tangible advances in Publications, prestige Desired output 12 the state-of-the-art

A case study of research at Google The Network Infrastructure Group “creates the networks that power Google” https://research.google.com/teams/netsys/ 13

Leading by example at Google 14

NetInfra focus and publishing Thinking about Availability in Large Service Network Congestion control Infrastructures, HotOS 2017 management BBR: Congestion-based congestion control, CACM Evolve or Die: Feb 2017 High-Availability Design Principles Drawn from SDN Carousel: Scalable Traffic Google's Network Shaping at End Hosts, Infrastructure, Sigcomm Taking the Edge off with Sigcomm 2017 2016 Espresso: Scale, Reliability and Programmability for Global Internet Peering, Data center networks Sigcomm 2017 BwE: Flexible, hierarchical bandwidth Jupiter rising: a decade of B4: Experience with a allocation for WAN clos topologies and Globally Deployed Software distributed computing, centralized control in Defined WAN, Sigcomm 2013 Sigcomm 2016 Google's datacenter network, Sigcomm 2016 Wide area networks 15

My current project ● Goals Improve our understanding of how changes in the ○ network affect applications Know whether applications are getting the best ○ possible network performance ● Approach A network telemetry system at the intersection of ○ the RPC layer and the transport protocol Instrumentation across all of Google, from data ○ center to WAN 16

Network operators vs users User: My pager went off 4 times overnight due to latency SLO violations. The network is broken! Operator: No hardware issues. Utilization and load balancing looks good. There were some discard spikes on a few switches. Reconciling these views is often a hard problem, especially at scale, but critical for Google! 17

Challenges ● Data collection What should we measure? At what resolution? ○ What information should we store, and in what form? ○ ● Tools and techniques to exploit the data Automated analysis: e.g. anomaly detection, A/B comparison, ○ critical path analysis Performance debugging via fine-grained inspection ○ ● Handling the (big) data We collect telemetry on millions of RPCs per second ○ Our daily processing job requires ~1PB temp storage and persists ○ ~10TB / day 18

Succeeding as a researcher in industry Choose your problems wisely There is no glory in solving a problem that nobody cares about ● Build a network Know who to talk to ● Be adaptable and play to your strengths Critical thinking and analysis ● Awareness of the big picture ● Knowledge about state-of-the-art ● Presentation and writing skills ● 19

Succeeding as a systems researcher in industry Be prepared to “shovel” Implementation, code review, testing, on-call duties, documentation, rollout ● schedules, pre-existing code, poor designs, ugly abstractions, ... Be aware of the priorities of your team and your organization Pragmatism rather than idealism ● Interact outside your team Understand others’ problems and constraints ● 20

Staying in touch: external community service Can be personally rewarding and professionally advantageous. However, employers will typically underestimate the amount of time and energy external service demands. You may be “encouraged” to do it, but not necessarily given enough time at work. 21

Program committees: why? Stay visible in the research community Have visibility of the research community Networking opportunities : hiring, interns, being invited to give talks at diversity workshops 22

Program committees: why? Keep your skills sharp Critical thinking ● Opportunities to learn ● Experimental method, motivating a problem etc. ○ Abstract problem solving ● “Just write the code” can be a seductive way to avoid ○ thinking too hard Articulating technical arguments ● Writing (for the authors) ○ Speaking (in the PC meeting) ○ 23

Program committees: how? It’s by invitation, my advisor doesn’t help, nobody knows me… Advice Let people know that you want to do it ● Take on other volunteer tasks for conferences ○ When asked, do it well ● Even shadow PCs matter ○ Even small workshops matter ○ Even journals that you believe nobody reads matter ○ 24

What about the diversity card? PC Chairs will usually try to put together a diverse PC. This does not mean that you are invited solely because of your diversity. If you want to be invited again, make sure to do a good job. 25

Conclusion Systems research in industry can be tough, the real world is… well,… real but potentially tremendously impactful and rewarding. 26