[Summer of 2007 in Central Park, New York;
photo by: Ioana Burcea]

Livio Soares

Email address as image to avoid spam
PhD Student of Computer Engineering
at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
in the University of Toronto.

My (broad) research interests include:

  • Operating Systems in general
    • Scalalability
    • Virtualization
    • Memory Management, File Systems, etc.
  • Computer Architecture
    • Computer Architecture interactions with the OS
  • Compilers
    • Dynamic Optimization Systems
  • Distributed Systems
  • Parallel Computing
Advisor: Michael Stumm
Research| Publications| Operating Systems Conferences| Research Links| Personal| Contact Info

Research

My research is currently focused on the performance of systems software. More specifically, I am investigating the interactions between modern computer architectures and systems software. One useful tool which I have worked with is the hardware performance counters found in most modern processors. I investigate software scalability in the face of current chip-multiprocessor and multithreaded hardware trends.

During the last years, I have been actively hacking the K42 research operating system, from which I have learned a great deal about operating-system structure, design and implementation. K42 is a research operating system designed for shared-memory multiprocessors with scalability and flexibility as its main goals.

For my Masters, I developed the K42 File System (KFS), including a concurrent port to the Linux kernel. The goal of KFS was to build an infra-structure for a flexible file-system where each file or directory can have distinct implementations (layout on disk and caching policies). During KFS' development I also developed a novel file-system consistency technique called meta-data snapshotting, which was possible given KFS' unique decentralized meta-data structure. This work was done at the University of São Paulo; you can still visit my old web-page there.

Publications

  • 2009

    • RapidMRC: Approximating L2 Miss Rate Curves on Commodity Systems for Online Optitmizations
      [Paper: PDF ]
      David Tam, Reza Azimi, Livio Soares, and Michael Stumm
      In the 14th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'09)

    • Enhancing Operating System Support for Multicore Processors by Using Hardware Performance Monitoring
      [Paper: PDF ]
      Reza Azimi, David Tam, Livio Soares, and Michael Stumm
      ACM SIGOPS Operating System Review (OSR) - Special issue on The Interaction Among the OS, the Compiler, and Multicore Processors, April 2009

  • 2008

    • Reducing the Harmful Effects of Last-Level Cache Polluters with an OS-Level, Software-Only Pollute Buffer
      [Paper: PDF, Slides: PPT, PDF ]
      Livio Soares, David Tam and Michael Stumm
      In the 41st International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-41), Lake Como, Italy, 2008
      One of the eight papers nominated for the Best Paper Award by the Program Committee.

  • 2007

    • PATH: Page Access Tracking to Improve Memory Management
      [Paper: PDF]
      Reza Azimi, Livio Soares, Michael Stumm, Angela Demke-Brown, and Tom Walsh
      In International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM 2007)

    • Experience Distributing Objects in an SMMP OS
      [Paper: PDF]
      Jonathan Appavoo, Dilma Da Silva, Orran Krieger, Marc Auslander, Michal Ostrowski, Bryan Rosenburg, Amos Waterland, Robert W. Wisniewski, Jimi Xenidis, Michael Stumm, Livio Soares
      In ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) [2007, Volume 25, Issue 3]

    • Managing Shared L2 Caches on Multicore Systems in Software
      [Paper: PDF]
      David Tam, Reza Azimi, Livio Soares, and Michael Stumm
      Workshop on the Interaction between Operating Systems and Computer Architecture (WIOSCA 2007) [Held with ISCA-2007]

    • Experiences Understanding Performance in a Commercial Scale-Out Environment
      [Paper: PDF]
      Robert W. Wisniewski, Reza Azimi, Mathieu Desnoyers, Maged M. Michael, Jose Moreira, Doron Shiloach, and Livio Soares
      In European Conference on Parallel Computing (Euro-Par 2007)

  • 2004

    • KFS: Exploring Flexibility in File System Design
      [Paper: PDF]
      Dilma Da Silva, Livio Soares, and Orran Krieger
      In the Brazilian Workshop on Operating Systems (WSO'2004)
      It is also available on the K42 web page here

    • (Poster) Meta-data Snapshotting: The Quest for File System Consistency
      [Poster: PS.gz]
      Livio Soares, Orran Krieger, Dilma Da Silva
      In the Poster Session of the 19th SOSP

  • 2003

    • Meta-data Snapshotting: A Simple Mechanism for File System Consistency
      [Paper: PDF]
      Livio Soares, Orran Krieger, Dilma Da Silva
      In International Workshop on Storage Network Architecture and Parallel I/O (SNAPI '03)
      It is also available on the K42 web page here, and on the SNAPI page here.

  • Master's Thesis (in Portuguese):

Research Links

Resources I have found useful and/or interesting for my research:

Personal

  • Ioana helps me to keep on hoping and dreaming.
  • Calvin's perspective on the world (education included) is sublimely acid.
  • Piled Higher & Deeper - hilarious, yet strikingly familiar, comics about PhD life (or the lack thereof).

Contact Information:

Email: Email address as image to avoid spam
Lab phone: +1-416-978-1241
Alternative Lab Phone: +1-416-978-1677

University Mailing Address
Livio Soares
ECE Graduate Office, SF-1107
10 King's College Road
M5S 3G4
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Physical Lab Address
Room 372, D.L. Pratt Building
6 King's College Road
M5S 3H5
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Last modified: Tue Nov 3 10:12:14 EST 2009