About

I'm a tenure-track faculty member ("Nachwuchsgruppenleiter") at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) and head of the Real-Time Systems Group.

Prior to joining MPI-SWS, I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2006-2011), where I worked with Jim Anderson. At UNC, I was supported in part by the German-American Fulbright Program and a UNC Dissertation Completion Research Fellowship.

My dissertation was awarded the 2012 UNC Dean's Distinguished Dissertation Award, and subsequently honored at the national level with the 2012 CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award (both in the area of Mathematics, Physical Sciences, and Engineering), marking only the second time that a UNC graduate has won this award since its inception in 1982 (UNC Graduate School press release). At DATE 2013, my dissertation was honored with the EDAA Outstanding Dissertations Award 2012 in the category “New directions in embedded system design and embedded software.”

Originally, I'm from Berlin, Germany, where I attended TU Berlin (2003-2006).

Research Interests

My main research interests are real-time systems, operating systems, synchronization protocols, and embedded systems. In particular, I'm interested in the intersection of these topics. My focus is the design and implementation of systems that are robust, efficient, and amenable to a priori analysis.

Due to my work with OS kernels, I'm also interested in the construction, testing, validation, and performance evaluation of operating systems and other complex systems software.

Projects

LITMUS^RT: The Linux Testbed for Multiprocessor Scheduling in Real-Time Systems. LITMUS^RT is a real-time extension of the Linux kernel that implements state-of-the-art multiprocessor real-time scheduling policies and locking protocols. Please see www.litmus-rt.org for details.
SchedCAT: The Schedulability test Collection And Toolkit. SchedCAT is a Python/C++ library containing real-time schedulability tests, blocking analysis, overhead accounting methods, and task set generators. Project page and source code repository.

Teaching

Summer 2013: Fault-Tolerant Distributed Real-Time Systems (seminar)
Summer 2013: Operating Systems (core lecture)
Summer 2013: Operating System Design & Implementation “privatissimum” (small-scale, in-depth seminar)
Fall 2012: Real-Time Scheduling and Synchronization (seminar)

Students

I'm also involved in projects with Pramod Bhatotia and Pedro Fonseca.

Future students: I'm interested in working with both “hackers” and “provers” (i.e., strong systems students and strong theory-inclined students, or interns in either area).

Please use MPI-SWS's online application system to apply. When contacting me directly, please include some samples of your work (e.g., major projects, open source contributions, undergrad thesis, etc.).

Professional Activity

I serve on the PCs of the following conferences and workshops.

Past PC involvement.

Contact

I can be found most days in room 438 (in the Saarbrücken office).

MPI-SWS is located in building E 1 5 next to MPI-INF.

MPI-SWS
Campus E 1 5
D-66123 Saarbruecken
Germany

Email:	bbb -at- mpi-sws.org
Phone:	+49 681 9303-8401
Skype:	bb.brandenburg

Please note that I strongly prefer email.