Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award - 2024 - Rishabh Iyer
© Rishabh Iyer
Latency Interfaces for Systems Code
EPFL thesis n°9028
Thesis directors: Prof. G. Candea, Prof. A. Argyraki
For introducing the notion of latency interfaces in computer systems, along with supporting techniques and tools. Such interfaces will dramatically improve the ability of engineers to build, with much less effort, software systems that meet their performance requirements with high precision.
Today's computer systems, such as those powering online services like web search and e-commerce, deliver reliable performance (e.g., response times) most of the time, but not always. Failures to meet performance requirements can be costly; for instance, delays on the order of milliseconds can lead to millions of dollars in lost revenue, and the stakes are higher in emerging systems such as self-driving cars where delays can result in the loss of human life.
My research focuses on developing techniques that allow engineers to precisely reason about the expected performance of their systems before they are deployed in production. My dissertation introduced the concept of performance interfaces: simple, succinct programs that enable engineers to quickly gain confidence in a system’s expected performance without requiring them to delve into the system implementation or perform extensive benchmarking. To make these interfaces immediately useful, I developed tools to extract performance interfaces for a diverse range of systems software. These include packet processing applications critical to online services, low-level systems code such as system calls in widely used operating systems, and security-critical software like cryptographic libraries.
