About me

My name is Simon Gerber. I recently defended my PhD in the Systems Group. During my PhD I worked on a memory system for modern computers under the supervision of Prof. Timothy Roscoe at ETH Zürich. My current interests involve memory management on modern hardware, operating system design for heterogenous systems, and domain specific languages.

Past Research

I was working on the Barrelfish research operating system. Barrelfish is an implementation of a novel approach in operating systems design, that we call the multikernel. The idea behind the multikernel design (and Barrelfish) is to treat a multi-core machine as a small distributed system of CPU cores and to run an independent copy of a small OS kernel (called the CPU driver) on each of the CPU cores. System-wide synchronization is then provided by a group of processes called the monitors that are privileged user-level processes.

My focus area in Barrelfish was the memory management subsystem where I'm trying to see whether we can decentralize memory management in an efficient way and how to handle memory management on heterogeneous mulitcore platforms.

Publications

Authorization, Protection, and Allocation of Memory in a Large System

Simon Gerber
PhD dissertaion @ ETH Zurich, 2018
[ PDF ]

Distributed Object Capabilities

Simon Gerber
Poster @ OSDI 2016, Savannah, GA
[ PDF ]

Not your parents' physical address space

Simon Gerber, Gerd Zellweger, Reto Achermann, Kornilios Kourtis, Timothy Roscoe, Dejan Milojicic (HP Labs)
Paper @ HotOS 2015, Kartause Ittingen, Switzerland
[ PDF ]

Decoupling Cores, Kernels, and Operating Systems

Gerd Zellweger, Simon Gerber, Kornilios Kourtis, Timothy Roscoe
Paper @ OSDI 2014, Broomfield, CO
[ PDF ]

An Approach for Managing Large, Heterogeneous Address Spaces

Simon Gerber, Dejan Milojicic (HP Labs), Timothy Roscoe
Poster @ OSDI 2014, Broomfield, CO
[ PDF ]

Memory Management for Heterogeneous Multicores

Simon Gerber
Poster @ Eurosys Doctoral Workshop 2013, Prague, Czech Republic
[ PDF ]

Towards decentralized memory management in a multikernel

Simon Gerber, Timothy Roscoe
Poster @ OSDI 2012, Hollywood, CA
[ PDF ]

Education

I received my Master of Science in Computer Science from ETH Zürich in 2012. My Master's thesis was titled "Virtual Memory in a Multikernel".