Google PhD fellowships for ICSA student

Nicolai Oswald has been awarded the 2019 Google Fellowship. He received funding in the area of Systems and Networking.

Google awards are presented to exemplary PhD students in computer science and related disciplines and acknowledge their contributions to their areas of specialty.

Nicolai is working on ProtoGen, a project that helps automate the design of cache coherence protocols. They are hardware communication protocols that keep the caches of multicore processors consistent, which are typically hard to design and verify, yet subtle bugs can seriously affect end users. Recently, a cache coherence bug caused a popular mobile phone to ship with coherence disabled, which impacted the phones’ performance and power. Initial work on this project, published last year at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture 2018, was awarded a Top Picks honourable mention by the computer architecture community.

The ProtoGen project is led by Nicolai Oswald under the supervision of Vijay Nagarajan, in collaboration with Daniel Sorin from Duke University.

The fellowship from Google will provide excellent visibility for Nicolai and ProtoGen.

Vijay Nagarajan

Fellowships include support for students as well as a Google Research Mentor. The programme was created to recognize outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in computer science and related research areas.

Relevant links:

Google PhD Fellowship Program

Mention for ProtoGen

Nicolai Oswald’s personal page

Vijay Nagarajan’s personal page

Daniel Sorin’s personal page