Page type: student

Emin Gun Sirer; Emin Gün Sirer;egs@cs.washington.edu;Department of Computer Science & Engineering,;University of Washington, Box 352350,;Seattle, WA 98195-2350 USA;;Background;I'm currently a third year graduate student at the University of Washington.;I grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, received my B.S.E in Computer Science from; Princeton University;in 1993 and am currently working towards a Ph.D. on the;SPIN;project with;Prof. Brian Bershad.;I spent the summer of '93 at;AT&T Bell Labs;working on the;Plan 9;operating system. I helped build a prototype 3-D display during the;summer of '91 at the NEC Research Center;in Princeton, New Jersey.;Most recently, during the summer of '96, I worked at;DEC SRC on the;Vesta 2 project.;Projects;My goal is to develop safe, adaptable and extensible operating systems.;I developed the threads, scheduling, synchronization, IPC, dynamic linking and;protection domain subsystems in SPIN. I also wrote the machine specific;aspects of the SPIN kernel, such as the system call and interrupt paths, and;some miscellaneous interfaces, such as alarms and mach compatibility support.;The novel;aspects of SPIN threads and scheduling are that they provide the means of;extending a kernel with arbitrary thread implementations and scheduling;policies. Dynamically linking the extensions into the kernel allows;us to achieve high-performance. The interface, called strands, is;designed to be safe and provide fault-isolation.;The novel aspect of the;SPIN protection domain interface is that it allows;isolation and safe fine-grain sharing at the same time. Extensions with;conflicting symbols can be simultaneously active in our system. Further,;extensions can hide some of their code and data such that they can be;assured that no one can possibly access them. The clincher is that extensions;that want to share code and data can do so with no dynamic protection;enforcement overhead.;I also implemented a high-performance;web server on top of the SPIN networking;stack. The main objectives in its design are reduced http latency and;minimal load.;I wrote a MIPS instruction set simulator a couple of years ago, called;MIPSI,;that was robust enough to simulate all the SPEC benchmarks and Standard ML of;New Jersey. It has been used both as an educational tool and as a research;platform. This page describes MIPSI's features;and availability.;Papers;Safe Dynamic Linking in an Extensible Operating System;WCSSS 1996. Describes the SPIN protection and namespace management mechanism.;;Writing an Operating System Using Modula-3;WCSSS 1996. Describes our experience with using Modula-3 to implement SPIN.;; Extensibility, Safety and; Performance in the SPIN Operating System;SOSP 1995. A design, implementation and performance paper.;; Protection is a Software Issue;HotOS 1995. A position paper comparing software and; hardware protection mechanisms.;;;SPIN - An Extensible Microkernel for Application-specific; Operating System Services;SIGOPS European Workshop 1994. Operating Systems Review version.;;;SPIN - An Extensible Microkernel for Application-specific; Operating System Services;University of Washington Technical Report UW-CSE-94-03-03, March 1994.;; Measuring Limits of Fine-grained Parallelism; Senior independent work, Princeton University, June 1993.;Talks;Language Support for Extensible Operating Systems;Slides from the presentation at the first Workshop for Compiler Support for Systems Software.; WCSSS 1996, in Tucson, Arizona.;Interests;Whenever I can find time and opportunity, I do some of the following:;sailing ~~~~~~ windsurfing;diving ~~~~~~~ skiing;biking;making outdoor clothing and;hiking.;I'm a big Bob Dylan fan.;;egs@cs.washington.edu;