Does god play dice? An I/O scheduling and airplane boarding perspective

Given N I/O requests to a disk drive, how long will it take the disk drive to service them? How long does it take to board an airplane? We will show that such questions are modeled by the same math that models the universe in relativity theory, namely, space-time (Lorentzian) geometry.As a result of this connection we will try to understand what is the best way to service I/O, what is the best airplane boarding policy and what makes free falling bodies take the trajectories that they do. On the way we may also encounter a silly card game and random matrices. The talk is self contained, experience with boarding an airplane is helpful.

Speaker Bio: Eitan Bachmat is a senior lecturer at the Computer Science department of Ben-Gurion U. He received his PhD in mathematics from M.I.T. He works mostly on the design of storage systems, performance analysis and applied probability. He also consults to the storage industry and participated in the development of several commercially available systems. Consequently, he has more patents than academic papers.