SSRG Student Projects General Information
The Group and its Working Environment
Operating Systems and Formal Methods
Some projects advertised on these pages are set within the Embedded Operating Systems (SSRG) research group at NICTA, the largest and most active Operating Systems research group in the southern hemisphere and the Asia-Pacific region and one of the foremost in the world.
The group is located on Level 6 of NICTA's Neville Roach Lab (223 Anzac Parade, Kensington).
Our research activities extend from embedded systems via microkernels through virtualization to general issues of system architecture and system security. The group is also interested in the investigation of architectural support for operating systems and languages. The group is well networked internationally and has collaborations and exchanges of visits with many leading private- and public-sector systems research groups.
One key feature of our group is that formal methods and operating systems practitioners work closely together.
In 2012 we have eleven full time research staff, all conjoint NICTA and UNSW appointments, thirteen full or part-time engineering/support staff (research assistants and engineers, some PhD qualified), twelve PhD students, and a varying number of undergraduates and Masters of Engineering students.
We are well-equipped with state-of-the-art computing equipment, and have experience with a large range of computer architectures, from ARM to Itanium. The group is is home of the PLEB computer and other designs derived from it. Furthermore, we have modern testing and other lab equipment.
SSRG research outcomes are being deployed in commercial products, and has a track record of getting Linux kernel patches accepted.
Software Engineering
Our research group also has strong capabilities in the enterprise space that is characterised by systems of systems. This will be combined with advanced software-engineering techniques to guide the necessary trade-offs in building system consisting of numerous components of varying (and often unknown) quality. With our successful eGovernment and financial services industry projects, we are interested in solving some key challenges in building cost-effective dependable distributed systems.
The Software Engineering group is located on Level 3 of NICTA's ATP Lab (13 Garden St, Eveleigh).
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 SSRG. 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 SSRG spin-out Open Kernel Labs and based on SSRG research.
Linux
... needs no introduction. It is a second focus point of the group's research. Some successes include the design and implementation of fast context switching on the StrongARM processor (50 times faster than in standard Linux), and removal of the 2TB Filesystem limit.
Cloud Computing Platforms
... are widely used within the software engineering group for dependable distributed systems research.