Gernot Heiser
Gernot Heiser (born 1957) is a Scientia Professor and  the John Lions Chair for operating systems at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). He is also leader of the Software Systems Research Group (SSRG) at NICTA. In 2006, he cofounded Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs, acquired in 2012 by General Dynamics) to commercialise his L4 microkernel technology.

Life 
Heiser was born in 1957. He earned a BSc studying physics at the German University of Freiburg, an MSc at the Canadian Brock University, and a PhD at the Swiss ETH Zurich.

Research 
Heiser's research focuses on microkernels, microkernel-based systems, and virtual machines, and emphasizes performance and reliability.

His group produced Mungi, a single address space operating system,
for clusters of 64-bit computers, and implementations of the L4 microkernel with very fast inter-process communication.
His Gelato@UNSW team was a founding member of the Gelato Federation, and focused on performance and scalability of Linux on Itanium. They established theoretical and practical performance limits of message passing inter-process communication (IPC) on Itanium.

Since joining NICTA at its creation in 2002, his research shifted away from high-end computing platforms, and toward embedded systems, with the aim of improving security, safety, and reliability via use of microkernel technology.
This led to the development of a new microkernel called
seL4, and its
formal verification,
claimed to be the first-ever complete proof of the functional correctness of a general-purpose OS kernel.

His work on virtualization was motivated by the need to provide a
complete OS environment on his microkernels. His Wombat project
followed the approach taken with the
L4Linux project at
Dresden, but was a
multi-architecture paravirtualized Linux
running on x86, ARM and MIPS hardware. The Wombat work later formed the basis for the OKL4 hypervisor of his company Open Kernel Labs.

The desire to reduce the engineering effort of paravirtualization
led to the development of the soft layering approach of automated paravirtulization which was demonstrated on x86 and Itanium hardware.
His vNUMA work demonstrated a hypervisor which presents a distributed system as a shared-memory multiprocessor as a possible model for many-core chips with large numbers of processor cores.

Device drivers are another focus of his work, including the first demonstration of user-mode drivers with a performance overhead of less than 10%,
an approach to driver development that eliminates most typical driver bugs by design,
device drivers produced from device test benches,
and a demonstration of the feasibility of generating device drivers automatically from formal specifications.
Recent research also includes power management.

In the past, he also worked on semiconductor device simulation, where he pioneered use of multi-dimensional modeling to optimize silicon-based solar cells.

Operating system projects 
 seL4 3rd-generation microkernel
 L4.verified formal verification of seL4
 Dingo and Termite frameworks for reliable device drivers
 Koala framework for OS-level energy management
 vNUMA, a hypervisor providing shared virtual memory on a cluster
 Mungi and Iguana single address space operating systems
 Wombat portable Linux on L4 microkernel
 Gelato@UNSW performance and scalability of Linux on Itanium
 L4/MIPS 64-bit L4 microkernel on MIPS architecture

Teaching 
 Advanced Operating Systems at UNSW

Awards 
 Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) Fellow (2016).
 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow (2016) "For contributions to security and safety of operating systems".
 Australian Computer Society (ACS) ICT Researcher of the Year (2015).
 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow (2014) "For contributions demonstrating that provably correct operating systems are feasible and suitable for real-world use".
 Scientia Professor of the University of New South Wales
 2010 Innovation Hero of The Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering at the University of Sydney
 NSW Scientist of the Year 2009 Category Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences
 Best Paper at the 22nd ACM SIGOPS Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2009
 Best Paper at the 13th IEEE Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference, 2008
 Best Student Paper at the 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference

References

External links 
 
 Gernot Heiser's blog
 Bio at CSIRO with full publication list

1957 births
Living people
Australian computer scientists
German computer scientists
Computer systems researchers
University of New South Wales faculty
Fellows of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering