Gernot Heiser was born in 1957. He studied physics at the German University of Freiburg, where he earned his BSc, went on to earn his MSc at the Canadian Brock University, and his PhD at the Swiss ETH Zurich.
Research
Heiser's research focuses on microkernels and microkernel-based systems as well as virtual machines, with a specific emphasis on performance and reliability. His group produced the Mungi single address space operating system, aimed at clusters of 64-bit computers, and implementations of the L4 microkernel with very fast inter-process communication. His 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 IPC on Itanium. Since joining NICTA at its creation in 2002, his research shifted away from high-end computing platforms towards embedded systems, with the specific aim of improving security, safety and reliability via the use of microkernel technology. This led to the development of a new microkernel called , and its , 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 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 the majority of typical driver bugs by design, device drivers produced from device test benches, and a demonstration of the feasibility of the automatic generation of device drivers from formal specifications. Recent research also includes power management. In the past he also worked on semiconductor device simulation, where he pioneered the use of multi-dimensional modeling in the optimisation of silicon-based solar cells.
