The goal of the systems & architecture area is to provide computer users with a productive and manageable programming environment. The area encompasses the various subfields that impinge on the design, implementation, and analysis of system support software (operating systems, programming language runtime environments, compilers, and debugging tools) as well as issues concerning the hardware on which the software runs.
Our well-regarded systems & architecture group has expertise in several areas. The main software research effort in the Department is concentrated on operating systems, which concerns the program modules within a computer system that govern the control of resources such as processes, main storage, secondary storage, I/O devices, and files. These modules resolve conflicts, attempt to optimize performance, and simplify the effective use of the system. Examples of operating systems include UNIX, VMS, DOS, MVS, and Windows NT.
The design of computer hardware (computer architecture) such as VLSI chips is done in the Department with extensive use of computer design and simulation software in order to formulate and verify the design before attempting actual fabrication. Parallel and distributed computing systems (that is, with multiple processors) and related issues of concurrent computation and communication are also important and challenging areas we are investigating.
Work on reliability analysis and performance evaluation of computer systems is carried out jointly in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.