Trustworthy Systems

David C. Snowdon
PhD Student; UNSW

Research Interests

Dr Snowdon's research interests include embedded system design and operating system directed power management. His undergraduate thesis involved the design of a telemetry and control system for the UNSW solar powered car, Sunswift. He co-founded Metamako which was acquired by Arista Networks.

Contact Details

Email:daves@cse.unsw.edu.au

More contact information is available at the Contact page.


His PhD thesis project has examined power management in the operating system for a reduced energy consumption in servers, laptops and embedded systems. This thesis is the first academic work to examine truly realistic frequency-scaling scenarios. The result is an implementation, called Koala, which, in some circumstances, can save nearly 30% of the energy for a program, with less than 1% loss in performance, simply by choosing the best speed for the computer's processor.

In addition, David has been involved in various projects at NICTA, designing the I-Box, a hardware platform for digital video surveillance analysis.

Projects

Past

Career Summary

Dr Snowdon has completed internships at the Motorola Australian Research Centre (2001) and the Corporate Technology Group at Intel, Oregon (2007).

He gained significant experience dealing with engineering and project management issues during his years as a member of the University of New South Wales Solar Racing Team where he served as the assistant project leader and then electrical team leader, being involved with all aspects, electrical and mechanical, of the Sunswift 3 design. He has since been an on-going mentor to the team.

Dr Snowdon enjoys teaching experimental robotics, operating systems, advanced operating systems, and microprocessors and embedded systems with the School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Qualifications

Dr Snowdon graduated as a PhD in 2009 from UNSW.

He also holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Engineering) degree from UNSW. He won both the NSW division of the Siemens prize for innovation, and the Institute of Engineers Australia thesis prize, for his honours level thesis. The UNSW Solar Racing Team was awarded the prestigious CSIRO technical innovation award at the 2007 World Solar Challenge, largely due to his work.