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Kyle C. Hale

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Illinois Institute of Technology

HExSA Lab

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I lead the laboratory for high-performance, experimental systems and architecture (HExSA) where we focus on various aspects of computer systems research. My research interests span several areas in systems including OS, computer architecture, embedded systems, system security, and virtualization. A current primary focus of our lab is the design of specialized system software stacks for parallel and emerging computing applications. You can see my publications below.

I received my PhD from Northwestern University in 2016 under the guidance of Peter Dinda. Before that I received my B.S. in computer science from UT Austin, where I worked with Boris Grot and Steve Keckler.

I am actively looking for new PhD students! Students interested in working with me should see this page.

If you're an undergrad considering research or going to grad school, you should take a look at this page.

Interests

  • Operating Systems & Virtualization
  • Parallel & High-Performance Computing
  • Computer Architecture
  • System Security

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science, 2016

    Northwestern University

  • MS in Computer Science, 2013

    Northwestern University

  • BS in Computer Science, 2010

    The University of Texas at Austin

Featured Publications

Isolating Functions at the Hardware Limit with Virtines

PDF Project Project arXiv

Modeling Speedup in Multi-OS Environments

Project Project TPDS

The Case for an Interwoven Parallel Hardware/Software Stack

Project ROSS '21

News

Our paper was accepted to EuroSys '22!

After an amazing push and a great deal of hard work, our paper on Virtines was accepted to EuroSys ‘22! Congratulations go to Nick Wanninger and Josh Bowden!
Last updated on Jan 19, 2022 1 min read

Multi-kernel Modeling paper accepted to appear in TPDS!

Our work on modeling speed-up in multi-kernel environments has been accepated to appear in TPDS! Congratulations to Brian and Conghao on the hard work, and in particular to Brian for the journal paper push.
Last updated on Sep 17, 2021 1 min read

Several HExSA workshop papers published

Several papers involving collaborators from The Ohio State University, Northwestern, and IIT have been published at PDADS ‘21, APSys ‘21, ROSS ‘21, and DaMoN ‘21, congrats to all the authors and collaborators on the hard work!
Last updated on Sep 26, 2021 1 min read

OpenMP in Nautilus paper accepted to SC21

Our work on bringing OpenMP implementations into the kernel has been accepted to SC ‘21! Congratulations to everyone involved on the successful collaborative effort!
Last updated on Sep 10, 2021 1 min read

Paper accepted to PLDI '21

Our paper, which was a collaboration with Mike Rainey and Umut Acar at CMU, Ryan Newton at Facebook, Nikos Hardavellas, Simone Campanoni, and Nikos Hardavellas was accepted to PLDI ‘21! Among other things, this work leverages the Nautilus kernel to achieve uncompromising parallelism.
Last updated on Apr 7, 2021 1 min read
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Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
Isolating Functions at the Hardware Limit with Virtines
Nick Wanninger, Joshua Bowden, Kyle C. Hale
PDF Project Project arXiv
Modeling Speedup in Multi-OS Environments
Brian R. Tauro, Conghao Liu, Kyle C. Hale
Project Project TPDS
The Case for an Interwoven Parallel Hardware/Software Stack
Kyle C. Hale, Simone Campanoni, Nikos Hardavellas, Peter Dinda
Project ROSS '21
Extremely Fine-grained Parallelism via Scalable Concurrent Queues on Modern Many-core Architectures
Poornima Nookala, Peter Dinda, Kyle C. Hale, Kyle Chard, Ioan Raicu
MASCOTS '21
A Look at Communication-Intensive Performance in Julia
Amal Rizvi, Kyle C. Hale
PDF arXiv
See all publications

HExSA Lab

We are interested in the design of systems software for high-performance and parallel computing. As we see hardware scale up–both in terms of the number of interconnected machines and in terms of the number of computing elements on a single chip–We believe it is time to reconsider some of the design decisions that have sustained the popularity of the Linux/x86 software stack for general-purpose computing. Particularly, how should we organize/structure systems software stacks for future massive-scale machines?

Principal Investigator

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Kyle C. Hale

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Operating Systems & Virtualization, Parallel & High-Performance Computing, Computer Architecture, System Security

PhD Students

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Brian R. Tauro

3rd Year PhD Student

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Conghao Liu

4th Year PhD Student

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Nanda Velugoti

1st Year PhD Student

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MD Ali

2nd Year PhD Student

Masters Students

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Andrew Neth

Coterm Researcher

Undergraduates

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Karl Hallsby

Undergraduate researcher (REU)

Alumni

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Joshua Bowden

Coterm Researcher (Alumni)

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Nick Wanninger

Undergraduate Researcher (Alumni)

Operating systems, Programming languages and compilers, Virtualization

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Amal Rizvi

4th Year PhD Student

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Hussain Khajanchi

Undergraduate Student (REU)

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Iris Uwizeyimana

Undergraduate Researcher

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Ganesh Mahesh

M.S. Research Assistant

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Justin Goodman

Undergraduate researcher (REU)

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Trevor Pritchett

Undergraduate Researcher

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Goutham Kannan

M.S. Research Assistant

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Imran Ali Usmani

M.S. research assistant

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Sam Grayson

Undergraduate researcher (REU)

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Akhil Kodumuri

Undergraduate researcher (REU, alumni)

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Alexandra Suarez

Undergraduate researcher (REU, alumni)

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Cooper Van Kampen

Masters Student

Cybersecurity, Operating Systems

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Devyn Keeney

Undergraduate researcher (REU, alumni)

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Florentin Bekier

M.S. Research Assistant

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Gyucheon Heo

M.S. Research Assistant

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Isabel Raymundo

Undergraduate researcher (REU, alumni)

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Jagruti Depan

Undergraduate researcher (REU)

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Josue Nieves

Undergraduate researcher (REU)

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Justin Orr

Undergraduate researcher

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Lucas Myers

Undergraduate researcher

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Nithin Rao

M.S. Research Assistant (alumni)

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Piyush Nath

M.S. research assistant

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Suraj Chafle

M.S. research assistant

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Zachary Mckee

Research

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All Operating Systems Computer Architecture High-Performance Computing Virtualization System Security Databases Compilers Programming Languages Artificial Intelligence Distributed Systems

Next-Generation Near-Data Processing Architectures

In this work, we propose an integrated, full-stack System to enable Memory-Centric Computing (SMC2). We target a system that has near-memory data processors (NDP) as well as an extendable memory pool.

Coalescent Computing

As computational infrastructure extends to the edge, it will increasingly offer the same fine-grained resource provisioning mechanisms used in large-scale cloud datacenters, and advances in low-latency, wireless networking technology will allow service providers to blur the distinction between local and remote resources for commodity computing.

Virtines: Isolated Execution at Function Call Granularity

We are exploring the limits of hardware virtualization by running individual functions in lightweight, virtualized execution environments called virtines. Programmers create virtines by annotating existing functions in C or Rust, and our runtime system (Wasp) manages virtual machines automatically.

Coordinated Resource Management for Cloud-based Specialized Operating Systems

Containerization has recently gained significant interest among cloud providers and users due to its ease of deployment and lightweight virtualization capabilities. The key feature of these approaches is the sharing of a single Linux OS instance among each active container environment.

The Interweaving Project

Nautilus Aerokernel

Nautilus is a custom, lightweight operating system kernel designed for being fused with high-performance, parallel runtime systems. See more here.

Hybrid Runtimes for Compiled Dataflows

We observe that the OS and database communities face a similar challenge: how do we optimize systems to exploit the characteristics of specialized hardware without sacrificing the flexibility of general-purpose designs?

Teaching

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All Systems Architecture HPC Virtualization Security Seminars

CS 595: Advanced Topics in Serverless and Edge Computing

Past Iterations: Fall ‘21
Last updated on Jan 6, 2022

CSP 544: System and Network Security

Current Iteration: Spring ‘22 Past Iterations: Spring ‘20
Last updated on Jan 6, 2022

CS 695: Doctoral Seminar

Past Iterations: Spring ‘20 Spring ‘17
Last updated on Jan 6, 2022

CS 562: Virtual Machines

Current Iteration: Spring ‘22 Past Iterations: Fall ‘19 Fall ‘18 Fall ‘17
Last updated on Jan 6, 2022

CS 450: Operating Systems

Past Iterations: Fall ‘20 Spring ‘19
Last updated on Feb 24, 2021

CS 350: Computer Organization and Assembly Language Programming

Past Iterations: Spring ‘21 Spring ‘18 Fall ‘16
Last updated on Jan 6, 2022

CS 595-03: OS and Runtime Design for Supercomputing

Past Iterations: Fall ‘16
Last updated on Mar 17, 2020

Funding

Collaborative Research: PPoSS: Planning: Towards an Integrated, Full-stack System for Memory-centric Computing

NSF Award CCF-2029014; $185,473 (Collaborative total: $250K); January 2021 through December 2021. This project is a collaborative effort with Rujia Wang and Xian-He Sun at IIT and Peng Jiang at the University of Iowa.
Last updated on Aug 24, 2020

Collaborative Research: PPoSS: Planning: Unifying Software and Hardware to Achieve Performant and Scalable Zero-cost Parallelism in the Heterogeneous Future

NSF Award CCF-2028958; $41,627 (Collaborative total: $1.2M); October 2020 through September 2021. This project is a collaborative effort with Peter Dinda, Simone Campanoni, and Nikos Hardavellas at Northwestern University, and Umut acar at Carnegie Mellon University.
Last updated on Aug 20, 2020

CSR: Medium: Collaborative Research: Interweaving the Parallel Software/Hardware Stack

NSF Award CNS-1763612; $305,578 (Collaborative total: $1.2M); September 2018 through August 2021. This project is a collaborative effort with Peter Dinda, Simone Campanoni, and Nikos Hardavellas at Northwestern University. Also see here.
Last updated on Aug 20, 2020

REU Site: Collaborative Research: BigDataX: From theory to practice in Big Data computing at eXtreme scales

NSF Award CCF-1757964; $333,106; February 2018 through January 2021. This project is in collaboration with Ioan Raicu at IIT as well as Kyle Chard and Aaron Elmore at the University of Chicago.
Last updated on Mar 16, 2020

CSR: Small: Collaborative Research: Flexible Resource Management and Coordination Schemes for Lightweight, Rapidly Deployable OS/Rs

CNS Award CNS-1718252; $249,771 (Collaborative total: $499,735); August 2017 through July 2020. This project is a collaborative effort with Jack Lange at the University of Pittsburgh. Also see here. Current cloud systems leverage either heavy-weight virtualization (running applications inside full-fledged virtual machines (VMs) with their own operating systems) or containers (light-weight software environments that share a single underlying operating system).
Last updated on Apr 4, 2020

CRI: II-NEW: MYSTIC: Programmable Systems Research Testbed to Explore a Stack-WIde Adaptive System fabriC

NSF Award CNS-1730689; $1,000,000; July 2017 through June 2020. This project is a collaborative effort with Ioan Raicu and Xian-He Sun at IIT. This project will build a testbed for experimenting with reconfigurable communication and Input/Output subsystems to conduct low-level systems research.
Last updated on Mar 16, 2020

Other

Professional Affiliations

  • Member of the ACM
  • Member of the EFF

Personal

I love music. I'm a tenor sax player but also dabble with the guitar and piano (Sonny Rollins is my favorite sax player, Oscar Peterson - piano, Kenny Burrel - guitar). Lately I've been listening to a lot of Sam Evian. My favorite live venues in Chicago are The Empty Bottle and Thalia Hall.

I'm excited by all of the sciences, and I always enjoy getting to talk to domain scientists about their work at places like SC. I especially am interested in Astronomy, but unfortunately Chicago isn't the best place for stargazing. When I can, I like to get out with my Celestron StarSense Newtonian.

I'm an avid reader of all genres, but especially historical fiction, hard sci-fi, and non-fiction.

I love to travel. My next target is either Istanbul or Scandinavia. I speak Japanese (I lived in Tokyo a while) and I'd like to learn a European language.

Some places I've lived: Corpus Christi, TX; Austin, TX; San Antonio, TX; Evanston, IL; Tokyo; Albuquerque, NM; Mountain View, CA.

Hobby Projects/Misc.

  • A guide to booting a custom OS without a BMC using PXE
  • A Mandelbrot Set explorer written in Processing.js
  • A Conway's Game of Life simulator, also in Processing
  • Microbenchmark to quantify false sharing on multi-core machines (Linux)
  • Hawker custom custom container engine (private, email me for access), designed for my virtual machines class
  • Hawknest (private, email me for access) A 6502/NES system emulator written in C from scratch for my VM class
  • Hawkbeans (private, email me for access) A custom (and incomplete) JVM written in C for my VM class
  • A simple N-Body simulation of a galaxy in a 2D plane written in Processing JS. Uses Barnes Hutt (quad-tree based) algorithm
  • Epigrams on programming from Alan Perlis