this is my old personal home page as professor hosted by an independent ISP!
As I am working in secretive industry now - there is little material for a new page.
 |
assistant professor of |
e-mail whereabouts: directions to my office |
....here is a
collection of links to all my group-, laboratory-, department-,
university and other
home
pages: CoPs [my current
umbrella project], PDS [the group in Parallel
and Distributed
Systems, I am running], ICS [the Laboratory for
Computersystems, I was hairing for a while],
DINFK
[Dept. of Computer Science, I am affilated with], ETHZ [Swiss Institute of Technology,
the University, I work at]. My
who-is-who entry in the faculty directory (german,
english),
and
a completely out of date entry
in the official university register of ongoing research...(note [1])
My research interests are in distributed systems and in high speed communication technologies. My current plans include research in computer architecture (memory systems modeling) and in system software (infrastructures for scalable and distributed applications). I am currently building systems based on commodity PC hardware connected by a Gigabit networking technology with good scalability for several applications in scientific computing, distributed databases and everyday computing. An important priority in my research are proper scientific methods in performance modelling and in performance prediction of systems. My most recent work of (computer) architecture is the 128 x 1GHz node multiboot cluster XIBALBA, which is used for a variety of research within the departement of computer science (see project description, XIBALBA maintainers page).
While the computer hardware itself is getting faster and faster, steadily and according to a well predictable technology curve, the overall performance of a system remains dominated by system software overheads. Solving the problem of software overheads of a large system is more complex and challenging, than increasing clock speed, the capacity of memory or the instruction issue rates of the microprocessors. Commodity hardware components found in high performance desktop computers (currently based 1-4 Intel 80686 CPUs, aka Pentium Pro/II) and new standard network technologies (currently 1000BaseT, 10k Ethernet, multi GB SCI/Myrinet and Infiniband) are becoming commodities and are available at an excellent price/performance ratios. Such systems will give us an cost effective hardware test bed for our investigation of overall system performance. Optimizing a parallel or distribute system as a whole still requires many research contributions of better architectural models, better software structures and more efficient programming at the system software level.
99-002 Practical Computer Science II, Advanced Programming and Software Design
(University of Constance), SS02,
course homepage.
37-836 Informatik II, Algorithms, Data structures and Problem
solving for the EE students (Abt IIIb), SS99,
course homepage.
37-235
Computer Systems Performance Analysis and Benchmarking, WS02
course homepage.
37-023
Systemprogrammierung (low level
programming),WS02,
course homepage.
On April 22, 1997 I held a public inauguration lecture as a professor of computer science in the Auditorium Maximum, HG F30 at ETH Zürich. The transparencies for this lecture are available for download: (stricker-antritt.pdf, [1.5 MB]).
For a complete list of my publication, see the publications page of the CoPs project.
OS Support for a Commodity Database on PC Clusters — Distributed Devices vs. Distributed File Systems in proceedings of Sixteenth Australasian Database Conference (ADC), Feb 1-3, 2005, Newcastle, Australia, with Felix Rauch. Reprints: abstract, fulltext in pdf. Slides of the presentation by Felix: pdf.Optimizing Memory System
Performance for Communication in Parallel Computers in
proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture,
ACM/IEEE ISCA'95, June 1995, with Thomas Gross, abstract.
acrobat,
compressed
postscript
Communication Styles for Parallel Systems. IEEE Computer,
vol.27, no. 12, December, 1994, pp. 34-44, with Thomas Gross,
Atsushi Hasegawa, Susan Hinrichs, David O'Hallaron. Reprint as acrobat
(5MB), Extended version appears as CMU technical report
CMU-CS-92-215. abstract.
acrobat,
compressed-postscript.
 |
Upon request of my department head and the official faculty representation at our universityity, myself, some ETH staff and students drafted a rebuttal to an ill conceived proposal for an acceptable use policy of the WWW proposed by the university administrators. In particular the proposed policy of 1997 proposed that Internet links be treated as if they were content and that links |
|
that could lead to illegal
content must be removed immediately from ETH home-pages.
A slightly revised version
focuses properly on acceptable content on ETH servers and did no longer prohibit links per
se. It is effective since March 1st, 1999.
During the discussion of this ill
conceived university internal legislation I created, discussed and blogged a
schoolbook example pointing out that the World Wide Web is a new
worldwide medium involving links and that they are spanning across
different community standards of a more or lesser free speech in the US
and in Switzerland. To illustrate my point I included some references (links)
to two web-sites demonstrating the extent of racism (www.stop-the-hate.org) and the extent of pornography (www.persiankitty.com) on the Internet. Neither racist propaganda
nor pornographic pictures were ever reproduced on my pages and no
direct reference to such content was given, but both links referred to
sites that did deal with the corresponding topics by giving leads or
citing numerous examples. Stop-the-hate.org is actually an old, well
respected web-site of a civil rights activist who is sharply condemning
racism. There is no lack of disclaimers on the web sites I referenced. After nearly four years of
working under criminal charges the superior court of the state of
Zürich finally confirmed all the acquittals by the lower courts
and established a final ruling on the case as of Sept. 30, 2003. It
upheld an earlier ruling of the district court that a link to a link
to a link to a racist page can not be considered as willingful support
for the act of racist propaganda under the Swiss anti racism laws. It
admitted in its ruling that even if it were, the freedom of research
and teaching in the swiss constitution would have to be considered and
would be likely to prevail over the fact that hate speech is spread by
the mere discussion of its existence and the scholarly references to
it. The court had to further admit to a violation of my human rights
as expressed in the European Human Rights Charter by the excessive
length of a criminal trial, that an attorney general was trying to
uphold without sufficient grounds. It looks like the criminal system
is liable for damages and remuneration that occurred due to the
destruction my academic career and my reputation. However the local
justice system and the ETH seem to have in common that they refuse to
admit of any wrongdoing and mishandling the case, so I had to appeal
to the Zürich supreme court of appeals to fight for remuneration
until that court granted my appeal and ordered the lower courts to retry
the ruling on my damage claims. | |
Last updates:
tomstr@acm.org
December 21, 1997, Sept 2000, July 2001, Dec 2003, Dec 2005