Gernot Heiser will teach on operating systems for secure and safe embedded systems at the HiPEAC International Summer School
2017-02-21 Gernot Heiser will teach on operating systems for secure and safe embedded systems at the HiPEAC International Summer School on Advanced Computer Architecture and Compilation for High-Performance and Embedded Systems (ACACES '17)

Fifth Data61 Software Systems Summer School
2017-02-01 On February 13 and 14, 2017, the 5th Software Systems Summer School will be held at UNSW. PhD Students and their supervisors from around Australia are invited to take part.

Seminar: Mohan Baruwal Chhetri on Smart CloudBench - Performance Benchmarking of Black Box Cloud Infrastructure

2016-11-30 Enterprises considering migration of their IT systems to the cloud only have a black box view of the offered infrastructure. While server pricing and specification information is publicly available, there is limited information about the underlying infrastructure performance. This makes comparison of alternative cloud infrastructure offerings difficult because cloud vendors use heterogeneous hardware resources, offer different server configurations, apply different pricing models and use different virtualization techniques to provision them. One way to evaluate performance of available cloud infrastructure alternatives is to benchmark the performance of software systems deployed on the top of the black box cloud infrastructure. However, this process can be complex, time-consuming and expensive, and cloud consumers can greatly benefit from tools that can automate it. Smart CloudBench is a generic framework and system that offers automated, on-demand, real-time and customized benchmarking of software systems deployed on cloud infrastructure. It provides greater visibility and insight into the run-time behavior of cloud infrastructure, helping consumers to compare and contrast available offerings during the initial cloud selection phase, and monitor performance for service quality assurance during the subsequent cloud consumption phase. In this presentation, I will first discuss the rationale behind the Smart CloudBench approach for benchmarking black box cloud infrastructure. Then, I will present a generic architecture for benchmarking representative applications on the heterogeneous cloud infrastructure and describe the Smart CloudBench benchmarking workflow. I will also present simple use case scenarios that highlight the need for tools such as Smart CloudBench.

2016-11-30

L4 Microkernels Published
The paper ‘L4 Microkernels: The Lessons from 20 years of Research and Deployment’ was published in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. Authors Senior Principal Researcher Gernot Heiser and Principal Researcher Kevin Elphinstone

Seminar Irene Moser on Vehicle Routing with working hour constraints

2016-11-30 The vehicle routing problem has been investigated for decades. Most approaches attempt to solve a standard formulation of the problem with few constraints. More recently, studies that accommodate loading constraints and delivery time windows have started to appear. In most cases, the objective is to minimise the total travel distance, travel time or the number of vehicles used. The implicit goal is to load a truck 'to the brim', to avoid frequent returns to the depot. In an actual case brought to us by industry, one of the important goals is to adhere to the maximal number of daily working hours a driver is available for. This means that in some cases, optimally loaded trucks are undesirable because they take too long for a driver to deliver legally. Consequently, the problem has been formulated in a different way for the solutions to be applicable in practice