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Welcome to my personal homepage.
The work I enjoy lies within operating systems and systems software. I am driven to understand and improve the intersection of these layers, allowing applications to best exploit platforms. Specific areas of interest to me include concurrent data structures, the adoption of safe programming methods (e.g., languages such as Rust, or formal methods), virtualization, and new architectures.
I currently work as a Staff Software Engineer at BedRock Systems, a startup in California, where we work towards improving security in virtualized solutions.
Previously, 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. Prior to that, 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.
My CV can be made available upon request.
I speak German, love to travel and to fix my cars, and dabble in candid street photography and lock picking (don't buy Master locks). Rust is my favorite programming language. I also read Hacker News.
Musicians I enjoy include Purity Ring, Crystal Castles, Billie Eilish, Chvrches, deadmau5, Seven Lions, Ramses B, Röyksopp and many from the Neue Deutsche Härte (e.g., Rammstein, Eisbrecher, and Joachim Witt).
I live on the west coast in the United States.
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).