Željko Vrba

Born in 1977, I obtained a graduate degree in computer engineering in 2001 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, Croatia. After graduation, I worked for several years in the industry as a UNIX system administrator on mission-critical systems (most notably, one of the largests ISPs in Croatia, and a Croatian national certificate authority), C and C++ programmer. I also did some embedded systems programming in C (PalmOS) and assembler (Microchip PIC). Currently I am a PhD student at IFI-UiO.

Current work

Research

I am working on the Instance II project, sponsored by the Norwegian Research Council. My research focus are operating system kernels and their optimization.

Teaching

Occasionaly I give a lecture, or a short presentation about assignment projects for the Operating Systems course (INF3151/4151). I am also grading the students' assignments. In connection with the course I have written a small C tutorial oriented towards the students' needs in the course.

Resources

This section contains results of my work that I deem worth publishing.

Data processing toolkit. We have designed a C++ toolkit for sequential processing of data streams. Along with sequential processing it provides some features normally found in RDBMS, such as aggregate functions. Empirically it has been shown to be several times faster than PostgreSQL 8, although exact measurements were not performed. The main motivation for writing the toolkit was inadequacy of PostgreSQL for stateful processing of large amounts of data. The following link to the source (.tar.bz2; ~80kB) and documentation (PDF, ~100kB) of the toolkit. The toolkit is released under a BSD-style license.

Trace analysis of the LNE server workload. I refer to this data in at least one of my publications. Scripts used to produce summary data are here (.tar.bz2; ~36kB). Summary data output by the scripts, as well as Mathematica analysis notebooks are here (.tar.bz2; ~45MB).

Other

Apart from operating systems, my other areas of professional interest include programing languages (Ocaml is great!) and virtual machines, cryptography, computer security and applied mathematics. As a part of my PhD studies, I'm obliged to pass several courses. This is a list of courses that I've chosen:

Norwegian language (not related with PhD, but it's fun :))
Mathematical optimization (INF-MAT5360)
Specification and Verification of Parallel Systems (INF5140)
Selected topics in static analysis (INF5906)

Contact

Department of Informatics
University of Oslo
zvrba (at) ifi.uio.no

My personal web site is located here. Rather regularly, I'm maintaining a blog. You can also browse my bookmarks on spurl.net.

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