Professor
Computer Sciences Department
College of Letters and Sciences
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Michael Swift is a professor at the University of Wisconsin--Madison in the Department of Computer Sciences. His research focuses on the hardware/operating system boundary, including virtual memory, persistence and storage, new compute technologies, and device drivers. He received his BA from Cornell University in 1992 and Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2005. Before graduate school, he worked at Microsoft in the Windows group, where he implemented authentication and access control functionality in Windows Cairo, Windows NT, and Windows 2000.
I frequently collaborate with computer architecture researchers to investigate new processor technologies, such as transactional memory, heterogeneous processors, and hardware accelerators. Our research has demonstrated how relatively modest changes to existing operating systems could greatly improve the efficiency of these new hardware designs.
Most recently, my work has expanded to new storage technologies. Solid-state storage technologies, such as flash and Intel's 3D Xpoint memory promise large-capacity storage at speeds much faster than disk. My ongoing work focuses on how these technologies change system software, and specifically, on how to expose it to applications.
I also have research projects on high-speed data center networking in collaboration with Professor Aditya Akella at UW--Madison, and cloud computing security with Professor Jeff Chase at Duke University.
My graduate work focused on device-driver reliability and showed how operating systems could be made robust against crashes in this critical piece of code. We then expanded upon this work to focus on how to simplify coding device drivers, how to make operating systems tolerate failures of attached devices and how to simplify the testing process for driver code.