Prof. Dror Feitelson

This page contains: Research interests Biography Contact information	Related or interesting sites: Parallel Systems Lab Parallel workloads archive Workshop on experimental computer science Workshops on parallel job scheduling Performance Evaluation Links UseNIX: the advanced computing systems association Bioinformatics Support open-access journals! (computer science / mathematics) Church of Reality — a non-prophet organization
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Research Interests

I am the head of the Parallel Systems Lab here at Hebrew University, which is somewhat of a misnomer, as we hardly work on parallel systems any more.

My own research centers on performance evaluation, mainly workload characterization and modeling. This is part of a wider interest in experimental computer science in general. With my students I work on various aspects of computer systems, including parallel job scheduling, operating systems, and even a bit of architecture. Here are some details.

Workload characterization and modeling: I am interested in analyzing and characterizing the actual usage of parallel machines, with the long-term goal of placing research on a more solid foundation (i.e. use measurements rather than assumptions as a basis). This sometimes leads to pretty pictures. As part of this effort, I also maintain an archive of parallel workloads, which contains workload logs from various production installations, workload models proposed in the literature, and a bibliographical listing. I'm also working on a book on this subject.
Parallel job scheduling: This refers to scheduling parallel jobs for execution by an operating system, as opposed to off-line task scheduling. I have worked on gang scheduling and backfilling. I am also the founding co-organizer of a series of workshops on this topic, which are held annually since 1995 in conjunction with other major conferences. Their proceedings are available from Springer-Verlag as part of the LNCS series.
Operating System Scheduling and Timing: My students have developed interesting ideas regarding scheduling for multimedia and removing ticks from operating systems. See the web pages of Yoav Etsion and Dan Tsafrir.
Software engineering: I'm interested in how software evolves and the open-source movement. But haven't really done much yet.

Other things I've worked on in the past include

Parallel systems: I've worked on a couple of experimental parallel system: the Makbilan and the ParPar cluster, and also on early versions of the IBM SP. More details in the Parallel Systems Lab.
Parallel I/O: This is what I did in my postdoc at IBM Research, which culminated with the implementation of the Vesta parallel file system (the basis for IBM's PIOFS) (work with Peter Corbett). I was also involved in the inception of the MPI-IO standard proposal, which was later incorporated into MPI-2.
Digital libraries: I did some work on digital libraries, and implemented a neat system called BoW for ``bibliography on the web''; this is a bibliographical repository on the topic of parallel systems.
Optical Computing: In the more distant past I wrote an extensive survey on optical computing, and did some work on using optical networks.

Biography

1982-1985	BSc in Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science, at the Hebrew University.
1985-1987	MSc in Computer Science at Hebrew University. Thesis subject: a survey of optical computing. Advisors: Prof. Danny Dolev and Prof. Larry Rudolph.
1987-1991	PhD in Computer Science at Hebrew University. Thesis subject: gang scheduling with distributed hierarchical control. Advisor: Prof. Larry Rudolph.
1992-1995	Postdoc at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown heights, NY. Worked mainly on the Vesta parallel file system, which was the basis for the Parallel I/O File System on the IBM SP2. Host: Prof. Marc Snir.
since fall 1995	Lecturer of Computer Science at Hebrew University.
May 2002	Promoted to Senior Lecturer with tenure.
2004-2005	Sabattical at Vanderbilt University. Host: Prof. Steve Schach.
Nov 2006	Promoted to Associate Professor.

Contact Information

Dror Feitelson
School of Computer Science and Engineering
The Hebrew University
91904 Jerusalem, ISRAEL

e-mail: 

Phone: +972-2-658-4115
Fax:   +972-2-675-7344

Office: Ross 75

Background: The background color of this page is supposed to be like that of the red granite rocks in the Santa Katarina area in the Sinai peninsula. This is my favorite type of rock.

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Last modified: May 14, 2006 /