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Oliver Trachsel
ETH Zurich |
About me
I am a research and teaching assistant at the Computer Systems Institute of ETH Zurich in the group of Thomas Gross.
My research interests lie in the areas of parallel programming and operating systems. I am looking into offering language-, run-time-, and OS support to facilitate leveraging multi-core and multi-processor systems.
Additionally, I am maintaining and enhancing the ETH Lecture Communicator, a communication tool used in class that stimulates and facilitates interactivity between lecturer and students. The system runs stable and is freely available.
Past projects
In collaboration with Christoph von Praun, now at Georg-Simon-Ohm Hochschule Nuremberg, we studied and evaluated various approaches to improve the performance of memory fences in modern microprocessors. We demonstrated that the cost associated with fences can be remarkably reduced if the processor is made aware of the sharing properties of data, and compared this selective approach with speculative techniques. Our findings were published in an IPDPS'06 paper.
I participated in the development of ERCO, a Java byte-code to native compiler developed here at the Laboratory for Software Technology for research purposes. My main contributions were the implementation of the exception handling mechanisms, register allocator, and platform-specific optimizations for the IA32 back-end.
Further, I was interested in how operating systems and applications can leverage future non-volatile memory technologies that may replace current DRAM technology. This research led to PERSOS, a persistence layer integrated into the Linux operating system. PERSOS enables the persistent in-memory storage and retrieval of arbitrary data structures. A prototype, developed by Michael Ruoss as part of his master's thesis, is available upon request.
Student projects
| HS 2009 | Roland Schilter | A Competitive Execution Framework for Java |
| FS 2008 | Animesh Trivedi | Performance Analysis of the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor on x86-64 |
| SS 2008 | Christian Fischlin | Competitive Parallel Execution under GNU/Linux |
| Michael Ruoss | An operating system based data persistence framework | |
| FS 2007 | Daniel Kellenberger | Web-basierter Client für den ETH Lecture Communicator |
| SS 2007 | Johannes Schmid | A Linux Kernel Extension to Enable Process-Based Memory Modification Accounting |
| WS 2005/06 | Curdin Grond | ETH Lecture Communicator Office Add-in |
| Ueli Kurmann | PDA-Portierung des ETH Lecture Communicators | |
| Michael Ruoss | ETH Lecture Communicator - Integration von Studierenden ohne Computer |
Teaching
| FS 2008 | 252-2600 | Software Engineering Seminar |
| FS 2007 | 251-0051 | Computer Architecture |
| 251-0053 | System Programming | |
| SS 2007 | 551-0432 | Einsatz von Informatikmitteln |
| WS 2006/07 | 251-0051 | Computer Architecture |
| 251-0053 | System Programming | |
| WS 2005/06 | 251-0051 | Computer Architecture |
| 251-0053 | System Programming | |
| WS 2004/05 | 251-0051 | Computer Architecture |
| 251-0053 | System Programming |
Publications
Oliver Trachsel, Christian Fischlin, Thomas Gross, A Platform for Competitive Execution, ISCA Workshop on Parallel Execution of Sequential Programs on Multi-core Architectures (PESPMA'08), June 2008. [abstract, pdf]
Oliver Trachsel, Christoph von Praun, Thomas Gross, On the Effectiveness of Speculative and Selective Memory Fences, Proceedings of the 20th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'06), April 2006. [abstract, pdf]
Oliver Trachsel, Design and Implementation of a Processor and Memory Simulator for Concurrent Java Programs with Shared Memory, Diploma Thesis, ETH Zurich, February 2003. Received the ABB Research Award 2003.
Updated 2010-01-11