Professional Experience

December 2020 - present

Postdoctoral Reserach Fellow

University of British Columbia - Systopia Lab

Vancouver (BC), Canada

Reference: Prof. Margo Seltzer, PhD

Responsibilities and Projects

  • Large-scale evaluation of sparse decision tree algorithms
  • Specification of translation hardware semantics
  • Synthesis of system code interface with translation hardware using SMT solver
  • Verus: Rust-based verification of system code
  • Device deriver synthesis with behavior tries
  • Teaching: CS508 - Graduate Operating Systems (Lecturer)
  • Teaching: CS436A - Operating Systems Design and Implementation (Lecturer)

November 2014 - November 2020

Research Assistant

ETH Zurich - Systems Group

Zurich, Switzerland

Reference: Prof. Timothy Roscoe, PhD

Responsibilities and Projects

  • Dissertation: On Memory Addressing - a more faithful hardware abstractions for modern operating systems.
  • Barrelfish: Member of the core OS team working on device drivers, memory management, networking.
  • Sockeye: Describing hardware as seen by software using a formal model specified in Isabelle/HOL
  • Shoal: memory allocation strategies in a NUMA machine with knowledge of the access patterns.
  • Smelt: automatically tuning message passing primitives to the machine hardware topology using measurements.
  • Enzian: understanding the coherency protocol for the Enzian research computer.
  • Advising multiple student Master's and Bachelor's projects.
  • Teaching: Assistant / Tutor for multiple courses.

June 2018 - September 2018

Intern VMware Research Group

VMware, Inc. - VMware Research Group

Palo Alto (CA), United States

Reference: Jayneel Gandhi, PhD

Responsibilities and Projects

  • Project: Mitosis: Transparently Self-Replicating Page-Tables for Large-Memory Machines.
  • Design and implementation of page-table replication in the Linux kernel.

September 2015 - December 2015

Intern Systems Software

Hewlett-Packard Labs - Systems Software Research Group

Palo Alto (CA), United States

Reference: Dejan S. Milojicic, PhD

Responsibilities and Projects

  • Project: Consensus protocols and capabilities for the Machine.

June 2009 - November 2020

Staff Officer (Captain)

Swiss Armed Forces - Radio transmission and IT services.

Switzerland

Reference:

Responsibilities and Projects

  • Leadership and management training.
  • Planning and deployment of heterogeneous communication systems, IT systems and networks.
  • Leading education modules and training exercises with up to 350 people.

Service

Education

November 2014 - February 2020

Doctor of Science (PhD) in Computer Science

ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

November 2014 - February 2020

Advisor: Prof. Timothy Roscoe

Thesis: On Memory Addressing [ .www ] [ .pdf ]

September 2013 - October 2014

Master of Science (MSc) in Computer Science

ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

September 2013 - October 2014

Advisor: Prof. Timothy Roscoe

Specialization: Distributed Systems. Grade: 5.8 / 6.0 (with distinction)

Thesis: Message passing and bulk transport on heterogenous multiprocessors [ .www ] [ .pdf ]

September 2009 - September 2013

Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Computer Science

ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

September 2009 - September 2013

Advisor:

Thesis: Barrelfish USB Subsystem [ .www ] [ .pdf ]

June 2008 - September 2009

Officer School Swiss Armed Forces

Swiss Government, Switzerland

June 2008 - September 2009

Advisor:

Theoretical and practical leadership education and conflict management.

Thesis: [ .www ] [ .pdf ]

Contact

Reto Achermann

achreto [at] cs.ubc.ca

The University of British Columbia
Dept. of Computer Science
201-2366 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4
Canada