Research

Our research activities are centered around the operating systems: Between a rock and a hard place, operating systems are ocated between the hardware and application. We target general-purpose abstraction that have to cope with tight demands regarding nonfunctional properties, such as noise reduction, timeliness, robustness and hardware resources. We mostly do fundamental research with auxiliary funding provided by the DFG. Our Focus is on constructive methods for the design and development of versatile operating systems (extensions) that assist the application in exploiting the hardware's potential.

Research Projects

Current Projects

ATLAS: Adaptable Thread-Level Address Spaces (DFG: DI 2840/1-1)

In the ATLAS project, we investigate dynamic specialization and containment by means of thread-level address-space variations.

ParPerOS: Parallel Persistency OS (DFG: DI 2840/2-1)

In ParPerOS, we examine new abstractions for unified but efficient and optionally crash-consistent low-level memory management for data objects in heterogeneous memory systems that consist of volatile, persistent, distributed and other types of main memory.

CLASSY-FI: CLASSY-FI: Cross-Layer Application-Specific Synthesis and Analysis of Fault Injection

The goal of the CLASSY-FI project is to derive constructive methods and techniques for scalable, yet precise and complete FI to experimentally assess the robustness of safety-critical embedded control systems against soft errors. The key idea behind the CLASSY-FI method is an application-specific cross-layer data-flow analysis, by which we consider the program–hardware-specific fault-propagation structure systematically on different levels.

Rhodium: Open Source Ecosystem for Systems Education

We are creating an open, flexible, and well-documented platform ecosystem for the teaching and exploration of low-level hardware and software development. We will accomplish this by integrating, optimizing, and supplementing existing FOSS projects with high-quality educational materials to ensure their sustainable and long-term establishment in academic education and professional training.

Assosciated Projects

AHA: Automated Hardware Abstraction in Operating-System Engineering

Our goal with AHA (Automated Hardware Abstraction in Operating System Design) is to improve nonfunctional properties of system software by a very deep, but fully automated specialization of the application-hardware bridge represented by the operating system. We want to investigate, how more directly mapped implementation variants of the same OS functionality – which are semantically equivalent (only) for a particular application – can be generated fully automatically from analyzing this application and its specific interactions with the operating system.

CADOS: Configurability-Aware Development of Operating Systems

In the CADOS project, we investigate scalable methods and tools to grasp the variability on every layer within the configuration and implementation space, visualize and analyze it and, if possible, adjust it while maintaining a holistic view on variability.