Interests and Projects

One of the research areas the SSL is looking at is figuring out how to adapt known operating systems such as Linux to scale well in a high-bandwidth, low-latency cluster. This project tends to fall under the title of "lightweight kernels" because of its tendency to strip functionality from the linux kernel. Traditionally Linux has not been able to scale very well with the number of processors in such environments, but it may be possible to strip Linux enough of useless functionality so that it performs better. I am currently investigating how well the Plan 9 OS from Bell Labs can serve as a cluster OS. This also necessarily means investigating how difficult it might be to adapt the Plan 9 kernel to our needs.

Other people at the SSL are looking at how to take advantage of programmable network interface cards (NIC) to better utilize the underlying network bandwidth. This means that some of the protocol is off-loaded onto the NIC. Another facet is the use of the "Portals" low-level messaging, zero-copy library in lieu of more traditional protocols such as TCP/IP. The use of Portals reduces OS involvement and hence cuts down on the amount of overhead involved in message passing.

Finally a reluctant friend of mine is working on distributed sensor networks. Basically, he gets to play with little PDA's that pretend to be super-cool government spying tools. Other than that, I'm not quite sure what he is doing. It is entirely possible also, that he is not quite sure what he is doing. I wish him the best of luck...

Since I am a computer science student, I should mention what system I use at home. I am running a Debian unstable distro of Linux. I use KDE as my preferred desktop and mozilla-firebird as my web browser. I would use Konqueror, except Konqueror just doesn't have very good support for tabs and doesn't have any support for mouse gestures. I have heard rumors that some form of mouse gestures will make into KDE 3.2. Maybe that will be enough to make me change my mind. I was a long time user of Redhat and Gnome, but after three years of dealing with RPM dependency hell I decided enough was enough. As for Gnome... well I just decided KDE was prettier than Gnome. Anyway, KDE/QT applications are easier to program than Gnome/GTK programs. In the end, it probabley doesn't matter which desktop I use because Gnome and KDE will be merged to form Knome :)

Since I am a super big dork, here are some screenshots of my computer running KDE along with my emacs file.

• KDE with a normal kicker using Keramik and Noia icons
  
• KDE with the kroller superkaramba theme and slicker
• Emacs File

For a while I was pretty interested in the whole Java thing. The idea behind "write once, run everywhere" is quite admirable, and I do think that *eventually* something like that will become predominant. However, we are not quite there yet. For the time being, GCJ and IBM's SWT make a pretty neat combo. Recently, I've even heard they natively compiled the Eclipse editor. I think the irony is that a native Java compiler should have come before the virtual machine version. Then maybe Java would have become the dominant application level language.