Teaching
Office Hours: Wed. 2:30-3:30, Thurs 1:30-2:30
Research
My research covers interaction of operating systems and hardware, including devices and new processor/memory technologies.
Device Drivers
Device drivers are a major source of complexity, unreliability, and cost for modern operating systems. As evidence, drivers account for the majority of system crashes: Microsoft reports that 89% of Windows XP crashes are caused by device drivers, and Linux driver code had up to seven times the bug density of other kernel code. The objective of my research is to improve device drivers by (1) reducing the complexity and cost of implementing device drivers, (2) improving the fault tolerance of device drivers, and (3) improving the performance of device drivers on modern hardware and software architectures.
Transactional Memory
Transactional memory promises to simplify multhreaded programming by removing the need to associate a lock with each piece of shared data. Instead, programmers specify transactions, which forces a set of statements to execute atomically.
One of the key problems faced by transactional memory systems is virtualization and the operating system: how can you virtualize hardware support for transactional memory, so that transactions can co-exist with paging and context switching? Also, how can you provide unbounded length transactions in the presence of limited-size hardware structures? Finally, how do system calls and I/O operate in the presence of transctions? I'm currently working these questions as part of the LogTM transactional memory system , a component of the Multifacet project.
Michael M. Swift
Assistant Professor
Computer Sciences Department
College of Letters and Sciences
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Contact Information
608-890-0131
swift at cs dot wisc dot edu
7369 Computer Sciences
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1210 West Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53706-1685 USA