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Orran Krieger

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Orran Krieger

I am Director of Red Hat Research (while on leave of absence from Boston University), Director of the Mass Open Cloud Alliance, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Computer Science at Boston University.

Teaching

Research

I have broad interests in computer systems, with focus on operating systems, file systems, and cloud computing. As co-founder and PI of the Mass Open Cloud (MOC), I am leading efforts to create an open, distributed platform for AI/ML workloads. The MOC establishes a new model for public clouds where multiple stakeholders participate in implementing and operating the infrastructure, creating a multi-sided marketplace. At Red Hat Research, I am working with the global research team on advancing open-source cloud platforms for the AI era. My students and I collaborate closely with Jonathan Appavoo on Operating Systems and Peter Desnoyers on storage.

Short Bio

Despite my best efforts to focus on research and avoid management roles, on my sabbatical in 2024 I somehow ended up as Director of Red Hat Research leading Red Hat's global research team. I am now on leave of absence from BU helping galvanize Red Hat efforts to make the Mass Open Cloud an open platform for AI/ML workloads and a place to evolve Red Hat's open Sovereign Cloud work. I lead several interconnected open cloud initiatives including the Mass Open Cloud (MOC) and Open Cloud Testbed (OCT)—projects designed to enable innovation by a broad industry and research community. In 2017, together with Red Hat Chairman (now retired) Paul Cormier, I spearheaded Boston University's partnership with Red Hat, establishing the BU Red Hat Collaboratory.

Before coming to BU, I spent five years at VMware starting and working on vCloud Director. Prior to that, I was a researcher and manager at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, leading the Advanced Operating System Research Department and contributing to projects including K42, rhype, PHYP, Cell, and Linux. I obtained my PhD and MASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto, where my research focused on the Hurricane and Tornado operating systems and multiprocessor architecture.

Some Recent Publications

Ali Raza, Thomas Unger, Matthew Boyd, Eric B. Munson, Parul Sohal, Ulrich Drepper, Richard Jones, Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Larry Woodman, Renato Mancuso, Jonathan Appavoo, Orran Krieger. "Unikernel Linux (UKL)." EuroSys 2023: 590-605

Mohammad Hossein Hajkazemi, Vojtech Aschenbrenner, Mania Abdi, Emine Ugur Kaynar, Amin Mossayebzadeh, Orran Krieger, Peter Desnoyers. "Beating the I/O bottleneck: a case for log-structured virtual disks." EuroSys 2022: 628-643

Parul Sohal, Michael Garrett Bechtel, Renato Mancuso, Heechul Yun, Orran Krieger. "A Closer Look at Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT)." RTNS 2022: 127-139

Michael Zink, David E. Irwin, Emmanuel Cecchet, Hakan Saplakoglu, Orran Krieger, Martin C. Herbordt, Michael Daitzman, Peter Desnoyers, Miriam Leeser, Suranga Handagala. "The Open Cloud Testbed (OCT): A Platform for Research into new Cloud Technologies." CloudNet 2021: 140-147

Mania Abdi, Amin Mosayyebzadeh, Mohammad Hossein Hajkazemi, Emine Ugur Kaynar, Ata Turk, Larry Rudolph, Orran Krieger, Peter Desnoyers. "A Community Cache with Complete Information." FAST 2021: 323-340

James Cadden, Thomas Unger, Yara Awad, Han Dong, Orran Krieger, Jonathan Appavoo. "SEUSS: skip redundant paths to make serverless fast." EuroSys 2020

Amin Mosayyebzadeh, Apoorve Mohan, Sahil Tikale, Mania Abdi, Nabil Schear, Trammell Hudson, Charles Munson, Larry Rudolph, Gene Cooperman, Peter Desnoyers, Orran Krieger. "Supporting Security Sensitive Tenants in a Bare-Metal Cloud." USENIX ATC 2019

Andrew Baumann, Jonathan Appavoo, Orran Krieger, Timothy Roscoe. "A fork() in the road." HotOS 2019

Dan Schatzberg, James Cadden, Han Dong, Orran Krieger, Jonathan Appavoo. "EbbRT: A Framework for Building Per-Application Library Operating Systems." OSDI 2016

For a complete list of publications with citation counts, please visit my Google Scholar Profile.

PhD Students and Postdocs

Students/Postdocs whose research I have played a major role in supervising since coming to Boston University:

Major Projects

Mass Open Cloud (MOC)

Open, multi-stakeholder public cloud platform establishing a new model where multiple stakeholders participate in implementing and operating cloud infrastructure.

Website | Red Hat Research

Open Sovereign AI Cloud (OSAC)

Open-source solution for organizations standing up sovereign clouds, providing infrastructure services for AI/ML workloads.

GitHub Documentation

K42

Scalable, Linux-compatible research operating system developed at IBM Research, demonstrating advanced OS design principles for multiprocessor systems.

EuroSys '06 | SIGOPS '06 | IBM Systems Journal '05

Tornado

Operating system for shared memory multiprocessors, maximizing locality and concurrency through innovative design principles.

OSDI '99 Paper

vCloud Director

Cloud computing platform developed at VMware, pioneering cloud infrastructure services.

ACM Cloud Computing '10 Paper

For a complete list of publications with citation counts, please visit my Google Scholar Profile.