We're the Systems Research group at IBA: a handful of students and faculty who'd rather build the thing than just read about it. This blog is where we write about what we're building.
What "systems" means here
Systems research sits at the layer most software never has to think about: how an operating system schedules work, how a processor actually executes an instruction, how a cluster of machines agrees on anything at all. It's less glamorous than the applications built on top of it, and that's exactly why it's interesting. Every one of those applications is quietly depending on choices made down here.
How we actually work
A lot of what ends up on this blog starts as a class assignment. A circuit designed for a digital logic course, a kernel feature written for an operating systems course, a scheduling model sketched out for a class project: the kind of thing that's normally due, graded, and forgotten. Ours tend not to stay that way. An assignment turns into a question nobody in the room can quite answer, and the question turns into the actual project.
That's produced work spanning operating systems, computer architecture, and distributed and parallel computing, usually with more than one of those overlapping in the same piece of work. We build things that don't fully work yet, measure things that turn out to matter less than we assumed, and occasionally find that the "obvious" solution to a problem doesn't exist at all.
What to expect here
Posts here are technical, specific, and written by whoever actually did the work, not a summary of it written after the fact. Some will describe something finished. Some will describe something still in progress, or something that didn't pan out and why. If that's the kind of writing you're looking for, you're in the right place.
Want to write one yourself? See Writing for the Blog for how to get started.
