Winner of the SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award 2014

Monday, January 12, 2015 05:00

Nadav Amit from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology wins the 2014 SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award.

The SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award is an annual award that aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations within the scope of the SPEC Research Group in terms of scientific originality, scientific significance, practical relevance, impact, and presentation. This year, the award committee considered 11 excellent thesis submissions from universities around the world - Auburn University, Brown University, Caltech, College of William and Mary, Ghent University, Indian Institute of Science, Technion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Kiel, University of Pennsylvania and Virginia Tech.

The winning thesis of Nadav Amit, nominated by professor Dan Tsafrir, deals with technical issues encountered in contemporary operating system virtualization techniques. The committee particularly appreciates the deep insight and the immediate application potential, coupled with careful presentation. The award is to be handed over at the ICPE 2015 Conference in Austin, Texas (http://icpe2015.ipd.kit.edu).

In addition to selecting the winner, the committee decided to recognize two theses with honorable mentions. These are the theses of Zhenhua Liu, nominated by professor Adam Wierman of Caltech, for the contribution to sustainable data center management techniques, and Zhuoyao Zhang, nominated by professor Boon Thau Loo of University of Pennsylvania, for the work on performance of map reduce frameworks.

The award selection committee for 2014:

  • Walter Binder, University of Lugano, Switzerland
  • Andrew Bond, RedHat, USA
  • Klaus-Dieter Lange, HP, USA
  • Raffaela Mirandola, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
  • Meikel Poess, Oracle, USA
  • Sameer Shende, University of Oregon, USA
  • Cloyce Spradling, Oracle, USA
  • Petr Tuma, Charles University, Czech Republic
  • Jan Vitek, Northeastern University and Purdue University, USA

The SPEC Distinguished Dissertation Award was established in 2011 to recognize outstanding dissertations within the scope of the SPEC Research Group. Contributions of interest span the design of metrics for system evaluation as well as the development of methodologies, techniques and tools for measurement, load testing, profiling, workload characterization, dependability and efficiency evaluation of computing systems.
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