System and runtime software gain new opportunities for resource-efficient operation due to novel hardware capabilities, such as persistent memories, massive multicore systems, or application-specific accelerators. Nevertheless, these new features also create novel problems, e.g. in security (side-channel timing attacks such as Spectre), energy and power consumption (dark silicon effects), or dependability problems due to the increased transistor number and density. Accordingly, system and runtime software on all levels – hypervisors, operating systems, compilers and just-in-time translators – have to adapt to exploit useful features while mitigating the problematic ones. In this course, we will analyze current related approaches on conceptual as well as implementation level, so the students will gain a deeper understanding of current system software structures and realizations.
This course will be seminar-based. The syllabus will be a selected set of scientific articles. Students are required to read the articles in advance. In each seminar one or two students will prepare a short presentation and questions for the discussions.
Participation in seminars. The date of the first seminar will be announced in the beginning of September.
If you have an idea for an interesting, research-related topic in operating systems and runtimes you would like to work on, please contact me – I'm happy to hear about your ideas!
You can, of course, also choose from the topics described below (missing descriptions will be added soon):