EPFL Alumni wins prestigious award for his Ph.D. done at EPFL
Marios Kogias © 2021 EPFL
Marios Kogias, has received the 2021 Dennis Ritchie Award, given annually to the best Dissertation of the Year in the computer systems community.
Dennis Ritchie is known as the co-inventor of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system. The ACM Special Interest Group in Operating Systems created this award in 2013 to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of his legacy and what difference one person can make in the field of software systems research.
Marios Kogias received his PhD in 2020 at EPFL and was advised by Prof. Edouard Bugnion. Dr Kogias was presented the 2021 ACM SIGOPS Dennis Ritchie Award at this year’s 28th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, the flagship conference in the field.
The datacenter is a dynamic environment in which scale-out applications need to run under strict μs-scale tail latency service-level objectives. In his thesis, Operating System and Network Co-Design for Latency-Critical Datacenter Applications,and research papers, Kogias studied operating system and network co-design for latency-critical datacenter applications.
“His thesis demonstrates that the design of pragmatic, datacenter-specific solutions for scheduling and load-balancing based on new and existing abstractions can split the functionality between the end-points and the network to significantly improve throughput, tail latency, and fault-tolerance,” said Bugnion. “This award is a wonderful reflection of the importance of his work.”
Kogias was the driving force behind the Zygos scheduler, the Lancet measuring tool, the R2P2 transport protocol and the HoverCraft consensus accelerator, all developed at the EPFL Data Center Systems Laboratory (DCSL).
“I’m honored to have won the Dennis Ritchie Award and look back at my time at EPFL as a fantastic period in my career. I look forward to continuing this research in the future,” he said.
Kogias is currently a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, and will start as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Imperial College London in 2022.