ERTOS Student Projects General Information
The Group and its Working Environment
The projects advertised on these pages are set within the Embedded Real-Time Operating Systems (ERTOS) research group at NICTA. ERTOS and co-located UNSW research activities (the so-called DiSy Group) form the largest and most active Operating Systems research group in the southern hemisphere and the Asia-Pacific region.
As of October 2005, the OS group consists of 6 research staff (all NICTA researchers and UNSW academics), 14 full-time or part-time technical staff (research engineers/assistants, one of them PhD-qualified), 11 PhD students, 1 ME student, 11 undergraduate thesis students and one postgraduate project student. The group is located on Level 6 of NICTA's Neville Roach Lab (225 Anzac Parade, Kensington).
The group's research activities extend from embedded systems via microkernels to operating systems for 64-bit architectures. It is also interested in the investigation of architectural support for operating systems and languages. The group maintains active collaborations with HP Labs (Paolo Alto), Intel (Hillsboro and Santa Clara), IBM TJ Watson Research Center (New York), IBM OzLabs (Canberra), ST Microelectronics, University of Karlsruhe, Dresden University of Technology and University of Cape Town. It is a member of the world-wide Gelato Federation which aims at making Linux the leading operating system for Itanium-based computers.
We are well-equipped with state-of-the-art computing equipment, including several single- and dual-processor HP Itanium-2 machines, a quad-processor SGI Itanium machine, several two- and four-processor IBM Power-4 and Power-5 machines, a high-performance single-chip dual-CPU embedded MIPS processor board, and a small x86 cluster. In addition there are a number of (for kernel work) still useful older machines, including single- and dual-processor Alpha, UltraSPARC, and locally-developed MIPS-, XScale- StrongARM-based computers. The group is is home of the PLEB computer. Furthermore, we have modern testing equipment.
ERTOS research outcomes are being deployed in commercial products, and the Gelato team has a track record of getting Linux kernel patches accepted.
Systems
The project pages here refer to a number of systems we are working on. This is a short overview of them, with links to more information.
L4
... is an extremely small and high-performance operating system microkernel, under active development at Karlsruhe, Dresden and ERTOS. The DiSy group has in the past implemented the first 64-bit version (on MIPS, still holds the performance record for single-issue CPUs) and the first multiprocessor version (on Alpha) of this kernel. It is used as the basis of most of our embedded-systems work, and the Iguana and Mungi operating systems are based on it. A number of student projects use it, including Sunswift, the UNSW solar car, and BLUEsat, the UNSW student satellite project.
Most of our work uses seL4, the local research kernel, or OKL4, the commercial (but open-source) L4 version marketed by ERTOS spinout Open Kernel Labs and based on ERTOS research.
Linux
... needs no introduction. It is a second focus point of the group's research. Recent successes include the design and implementation of fast context switching on the StongARM processor (50 times faster than in standard Linux). Most of the Linux activities happen under the Gelato banner.
Gelato
... is a project to improve and enhance the performance and scalability of Linux, especially on 64-bit hardware. It is part of the world-wide gelato.org federation. Present work includes implementation of new page tables more suitable for very large address spaces, implementation of superpages (specifically on Itanium), SMP and NUMA scalability and and general performance tuning. Recent successes include a framework for efficient user-level device drivers, and support for large file systems (greater than 2TB).
For more information see the Gelato pages.