Personal Info
This is a personal homepage, so a “Personal Info” section is obligatory :-)
About
I was born on December 22, 1979 in Athens, Greece and spent my childhood in Dirrevmata, Konistres, Evia [Google Maps, Earth]. From 1997 to 2002 I did my undergraduate studies in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens. My diploma thesis was titled “Implementation of a Generic Linux Kernel-to-Kernel Communication Layer through Userspace, over SCI and FastEthernet Interconnects”. If you're really interested, you can grab a copy in PDF, in Greek.
After graduation, I joined the Computing systems laboratory, School of ECE, working as a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Associate Professor Nectarios Koziris. Our work revolved around clusters of Symmetric Multiprocessors (SMPs) created by interconnecting commodity nodes over high-performance networks, such as Myrinet. We studied the performance bottlenecks caused by shared architectural resources as is main memory and peripheral bus bandwidth and focused on enhancing system-level software in order to mitigate their impact.
Motivated by our initial observations, we worked on implementing scalable block-lavel storage sharing over Myrinet. The net result was GMBlock, a shared block storage system which can pipeline block data directly between remote storage and client memory. This happens over peripheral buses and the network, bypassing storage server RAM and the client and server host CPUs completely. If you are interested, please have a look at my Ph.D. dissertation (in English, with a summarized version in Greek) and at the relevant papers.
Overall, it was a fun experience, which involved a lot of programming in the Linux kernel, messing around with its Virtual Memory subsystem and writing embedded software to run on the Myrinet NIC itself.
In my free time, I enjoy activities such as listening to music I really really like, cycling, doing jigsaw puzzles, configuring mostly useless stuff on Linux-based devices, watching a good comedy or trying to play simple tunes on a Kurzweil, for which I'm woefully inadequate.
