Alexander M. Merritt

Welcome to my personal homepage.

I speak German, am learning Mandarin Chinese (你好!), piano, and love to travel and hike. Two of my favorite places to visit in the world are eastern Asia and Europe; I hiked to the top of Carrauntoohil in Ireland, via Devil's Ladder, and have visited Japan, Taiwan, and China multiple times.

When I have time, I enjoy fixing things with my hands (the car, the house, my back /s) and dabble in candid street photography. I own both Leica and Nikon gear.

Rust is currently my favorite programming language.

I live on the east coast in the United States.

Work Experience

The work I enjoy lies within operating systems and systems software, both within engineering and applied research. I am driven to understand and improve the intersection of these layers, allowing applications to best exploit platforms. I love working in new domains, and am excited to pursue opportunities involving machine learning, security, new hardware, and new languages (e.g. Rust).

Currently I am part of an awesome team at the startup Edera, where we secure emerging workloads with virtualization and a memory safe runtime stack.

At the startup BlueRock Security (previously BedRock Systems), I was a Staff SWE where we worked towards improving security for applications through a capability-based virtualization stack and formal verification.

Prior to that, I had multiple roles at Intel, lastly as a Software Engineer in the open-source technology center, within the virtualization team. My work encompased hypervisors, the enabling of Intel x86 features, and lots of hacking. During my first role at Intel, I was a Research Scientist in a "path finding" team (aka research outside of Intel Labs) in the Autonomous Driving Group, where I pursued enhancements to mixed-criticality systems.

I graduated in 2017 from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology with a PhD in Computer Science. My dissertation work aimed to improve the utility of large-memory single node systems with hundreds of cores, under my advisors: the late Professor Karsten Schwan, and Professor Ada Gavrilovska. During this time I had multiple opportunities to do research at Hewlett-Packard Labs, Intel Labs, and Sandia National Laboratories.

My CV can be made available upon request.

Publications

Proceedings

Paper

Talk Slides

Source Code

Concurrent log-structured memory for many-core key-value stores. Alexander Merritt, Ada Gavrilovska, Yuan Chen, and Dejan Milojicic. Proc. VLDB Endow. 11, 4 (December 2017), 458–471. Presented at VLDB 2018 in Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil.

SpaceJMP: Programming with Multiple Virtual Address Spaces. Izzat El Hajj, Alexander Merritt, Gerd Zellweger, Dejan Milojicic, Reto Achermann, Paolo Faraboschi, Wen-mei Hwu, Timothy Roscoe, Karsten Schwan. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS '16 in Atlanta, GA, USA).

Slices: Provisioning Heterogeneous HPC Systems. Alexander Merritt, Naila Farooqui, Magdalena Slawinska, Ada Gavrilovska, Karsten Schwan, and Vishakha Gupta. In Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE '14 in Atlanta, GA, USA).

Oncilla: A GAS runtime for efficient resource allocation and data movement in accelerated clusters. J. Young, S. H. Shon, S. Yalamanchili, A. Merritt, K. Schwan and H. Fröning. IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER 2013 in Indianapolis, IN, USA).

Shadowfax: scaling in heterogeneous cluster systems via GPGPU assemblies. Alexander M. Merritt, Vishakha Gupta, Abhishek Verma, Ada Gavrilovska, and Karsten Schwan. In Proceedings of the 5th international workshop on Virtualization technologies in distributed computing (VTDC '11).

Minimal-overhead virtualization of a large scale supercomputer. John R. Lange, Kevin Pedretti, Peter Dinda, Patrick G. Bridges, Chang Bae, Philip Soltero, and Alexander Merritt. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments (VEE '11).