Scientists.as.Citizens
All scientists should read this paper. It is titled Scientists as Citizens and was written by Nobel winner Sir John W. Cornforth. It is a priceless reflection on the role of science and scientists in society and the responsibility we must take on to improve the condition of our world.
my.research
Current.research
I am a PhD student in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta.
My supervisor is Dr. Paul Lu. My main area is of research is virtualization and specifically, the use of shared memory as mechanism for inter-vm communication and data availability. I am currently examining how virtual machines can be used to run large data-parallel applications on a collection of distributed computers.
While there are many options for virtualization these days, one must remember that the best things in life are free and so I choose to work with the nifty, open source virtualization product called the Kernel-based Virtual Machine or KVM for short. It's a fascinating product -- a small, efficient virtual machine and its code is freely available to download and work with (which is important for researchers like me).
My current focus is on improving the performance of programs that access large amounts of data. I am looking at techniques of device paravirtualization to support this faster data movement. I also wrote the shared memory interface, called Nahanni, (or ivshmem) so that co-located virtual machines can easily and efficiently share data.
Other.things
Throughout my time in grad school I've had several interests. They span several open source projects such as Linux, Samba, KVM, various programming tools and many other things. In the end, I still want to know how we can make computers better, so maybe people can find the experience of using computers to be less frustrating.