INGI Seminar - A real-time research journey from kernels to robotics

By Pr. Antonio Paolillo from VUB

Antonio's talk will outline his journey in real-time and low-level software systems research, beginning with his Ph.D. at ULB. There, he focused on developing power-aware parallel schedulers and real-time micro-kernels.

At the Huawei Dresden Research Center, he concentrated on implementing, validating, and evaluating the performance of synchronization primitives. He significantly contributed to the VSync project, aiming to validate and optimize spinlock implementations in system software. VSync used a novel model-checking approach for lock validation and barrier placement, uncovering bugs in major codebases like DPDK & SeL4. This led to an ASPLOS'21 distinguished paper award and the integration of VSync into various Huawei products.

Building on this, Antonio co-created CLoF, the Composable Lock Framework, enhancing lock scalability in many-core NUMA systems, culminating in a SOSP'21 paper. Understanding the limitations of solely focusing on locks for performance enhancements, he co-developed a new scheduler leveraging Performance Monitoring Units for workload-aware scheduling.

Returning to academia at VUB, Antonio plans to merge his expertise in performance evaluation and in real-time systems with broader system software research, potentially bridging these domains. His current work investigates evaluating and integrating heterogeneous systems, like GPUs and FPGAs, with real-time systems, and potentially extending previously developed synchronization primitives to these platforms. Additionally, he's delving into real-time software for robotics, aspiring to create safe and efficient robotic systems.

Antonio Paolillo is a newly appointed Assistant Professor in Software Technology at VUB, in the SOFT research lab . His research interests include operating systems, real-time and embedded systems. He received his Ph.D. in 2018 from ULB, specializing in real-time operating systems and power-aware parallel task scheduling. During his Ph.D., Antonio was also a founding developer at the HIPPEROS spin-off, a startup dedicated to translating research into practical real-time operating systems. Following his Ph.D., he spent four years in postdoctoral research at Huawei, balancing academic findings with practical industrial applications. Now back in academia, he is integrating theoretical research with practical applications, focusing on real-time Linux and heterogeneous computing. Beyond research, Antonio is committed to building a robust team of technology talents and is actively involved in innovative collaborative projects, especially in robotics, where he applies his expertise in software engineering, performance evaluation and real-time system design.