Faculty to receive $40,000 each towards research

2/13/2013 Kim Gudeman

Coordinated Science Laboratory researchers Ravi K. Iyer (ECE) and Zbigniew Kalbarczyk have been recognized with 2008 IBM Faculty Fellow Awards. The award, valued at $40,000 per researcher, will go towards benchmarking operating systems dependability and the development of OS-level techniques.

Written by Kim Gudeman

Coordinated Science Laboratory researchers Ravi K. Iyer (ECE) and Zbigniew Kalbarczyk have been recognized with 2008 IBM Faculty Fellow Awards. The award, valued at $40,000 per researcher, will go towards benchmarking operating systems dependability and the development of OS-level techniques.

“We will develop tool sets to enable error behavior comparisons of different computing systems,” said Kalbarczyk, a research faculty member. “Companies will be able to determine which operating system and hardware will best meet the application needs of their customers, and will allow them to compare their systems to competitors.”

The researchers are part of CSL’s Center for Reliable and High-Performance Computing (CRHC), whose members design and validate systems and networks that support desired levels of security and reliability and develop compiler techniques and processor and system architectures.

With the IBM award, they will continue their research on system validation and demonstrate the developed technology in error characterization of three operating systems, IBM AIX, Linux and Solaris, when they are respectively executing on Power 5, Pentium 4 and Sparc processor-based platforms.

Iyer, who is also interim vice chancellor of research, will study OS-level techniques to provide transparent rapid or low-latency error detection and recovery.

Kalbarczyk’s work will center on using NFTAPE, a software framework created by the CRHC group to conduct automated fault/terror injection-based evaluations of computing systems. NFTAPE will help quantify dependability metrics such as detection and recovery coverage, recovery time, and error detection latency.

The researchers’ biggest challenge is to create a testbed environment with metrics that fairly and accurately compare the systems. The developed tools including NFTAPE will play an important role in ensuring that measurements are taken in a well-defined, controlled environment.

Current graduate students working on the project include Weining Gu and Daniel Chen. Former undergraduate student George Huang and master’s student Thuy Nguyen also contributed to the research.

It’s not the first time IBM has bestowed the Faculty Fellow Award on the researchers. Iyer received the award in 1998, 2004 and 2006, while Kalbarczyk was honored in 2006.


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This story was published February 13, 2013.