Applications of Computing in Industry : Lecture

In this talk I would like to involve the audience in the process of building an audio streaming server starting from a single machine capable of serving tens of thousands of songs to hundreds of listeners and developing this into a system that can serve millions of songs to millions of listeners. The solution evolved will use many of the technologies and concepts that Last.fm's streaming services use including load balancing, distributed file systems, solid state disks, levels of redundancy, reliability and scalability. This talk will be as interactive as possible with input from the attendees highly encouraged.

Adrian Woodhead heads up the data team at Last.fm, working on systems that power one of the most popular music websites on the internet. His team's responsibilities include Last.fm's streaming system which delivers millions of streams per month, the scrobbling system which handles up to 800 requests per second and the music catalogue which consists of over 12 million sound recordings. Prior to this Adrian worked in Amsterdam for 2 mobile startups (both of which failed), a bank (good money but dull), a content management system (even duller), a digital rights company (good in theory, evil in practise) and in South Africa for a multimedia company. Before that Adrian graduated with a BSC (Hons.) degree in Computer Science from Rhodes University, South Africa.