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Research Activities
My
research interests lie in the general area of computer systems and
operating systems for multiprocessors and distributed systems in
particular. My research group has over 10 years experience designing
and implementing operating systems for shared-memory multiprocessors
where we have focused on scalability issues. During this time, my
students and I have built a number of operating systems including Hurricane and then Tornado., Both these systems
were build from scratch and in the end were reasonably complete,
running on hardware we had built ourselves (Hector and NUMAchine, a shared-memory
16-processor and 64 processor system, respectively). In 1998, we
licensed the Tornado operating system and its technology to IBM, who
used some of it for the K42 operating system. Since
2000, we have been working with IBM Research on continuing to develop
K42. As of February, 2004, K42 was listed as the top project to watch
for in a message
from Paul Horn, IBM’s Director of Research.
Specific
technology we have contributed to K42, include:
·
OO structure of kernel and servers
that (i) reduces sharing and improves locality significantly, (ii)
makes it easier to support customization and specialization, and (iii)
has obvious advantages with respect to software development and
maintenance.
·
Clustered Objects are objects that appear
to its clients as ordinary objects but internally are composed of
possibly multiple objects, one for each processor (subset). Method
invocations are automatically directed to the appropriate internal
object so as to maximize locality while avoiding centralized
bottlenecks. Hence, Clustered Objects are a mechanism to support
scalability even when objects are shared across processors.
·
Interpositioning and hot-swapping of objects, where
hot-swapping allow one object implementation to be changed for another
while the system is running and the object is actively being used.
Today,
K42 is really an operating system framework incorporating many
interesting operating techniques. It is designed for:
·
Flexibility through its OO
structure and object hot-swapping capabilities
·
Performance that scales both up and
down and has integrated performance monitoring infrastructure
·
Standards that include full
support for the Linux ABI/API
K42
is in part funded by DARPA (U.S.),
Department of Energy (U.S.), Natural Science and Engineering Research
Council (Canada),
and CITO (Ontario).
Industrial interactions
Besides
working with IBM, I have spent considerable time working with two
startups that I co-founded together with colleagues:
OANDA Corporation maintains a Web site, www.oanda.com,
that has
been the most comprehensive and #1 Web site for currency exchange rate
information since it went online in 1996. As a result, “OANDA Rates”®
have become the reference for corporations, tax authorities, and
auditing firms. OANDA also provides data and Web content to over 35,000
organizations, including many Fortune 500 companies. However, the
fastest growing business for OANDA is currency trading with its
innovative and leading FXTrade platform that processes several billion
dollars of trades on reasonably good days. Quite an achievement
considering that this level of business was obtained with no marketing,
no advertising and no sales effort. The engineering challenge lies in
the design of a scalable and highly available platform that has minimal
transaction costs.
SOMA Networks developed an
end-to-end, non-line-of-site wireless last-mile solution that allows
broadband IP and toll-quality telephony services to be brought to
market quickly and cost-effectively. The solution allows service
providers to offer residential high-speed (>1mbps) Internet and
“Class 5” telephony to areas where
land-line connectivity is unavailable or where incumbent infrastructure
needs to be bypassed. So far, SOMA Networks has raised more than $120
million to fund its R&D-intensive operations from institutions,
such as Allen & Co., Inc., Angel Investors, L.P., Mizuho, Sharp
Corporation, Signal Lake Venture Fund, LLP, and Technology Gateway
Partnership, L.P., and from individual investors, including Ben Rosen,
co-founder of Compaq Computer Corp. I was CTO of SOMA from 1998 to
2003, and a member of the Board of Directors (along with Bill Bradley,
former U.S. Senator, and Jim Manzi, former CEO of Lotus) from 2001 to
2003. I am no longer actively involved in SOMA Networks.
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