Stefan Kaestle
DFINITY, Zurich, Switzerland
About me Publications DFINITY Foundation Oracle labs ETH Zurich IBM Smarthome Shoal Smelt Machine Learning

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About me

 

Hi! I am Stefan

I am a computer scientist with a passion for distributed systems and operating systems.
I enjoy working on the intersection of theory and practice. I like to design challenging systems and explore their feasibility by building prototypes.
When I am not working, I enjoy all things tech. I spend more time than I care to admit optimizing my smart home installation. I also enjoy thinking about transitioning our world to sustainable energy and transportation, which is why I closely follow Tesla.
Of course, given my love for technology, I also closely follow SpaceX and their efforts to make humanity a multi-planetary species in Boca Chica.
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DFINITY Foundation

I am currently working as a Senior Researcher at the DFINITY Foundation in Zurich to help build the Internet Computer, a platform for generic compute on decentralized infrastructure with byzantine fault tolerance.
I'm excited to work with a smart team of excellent researchers and engineers on what could well be a revolution in the way we think about the internet.

Selected work:

  • Research lead of the runtime team
  • Protocol Upgrades: I was helping to design and leading development of Internet Computer protocol upgrades. Upgrades are difficult because the IC is a decentralized and byzantine fault-tolerant system.
  • Responsible for e2e system performance and scalability.
Details
DFINITY

Oracle Labs

Before DFINITY, I was at Oracle Labs in Zurich, Switzerland, where I was working, among others, with Hassan Chafi, Sungpack Hong and Tim Harris.

Selected work:

  • Callisto RTS: A runtime system for parallel applications with efficient work distribution down to small batch sizes to avoid work-imbalance. I also helped to extend it with Smart Collections, a programming language independent abstraction for data structures, which is tuning memory allocation to machine characteristics.
  • PGX.D is a distributed graph processing framework. My main responsibility was to add fault-tolerance and elasticity to it.

In 2014, I also had the honor to finish an internship with Tim Harris at Oracle Labs in beautiful Cambridge, UK.

Details
Oracle

ETH Zurich

I earned my PhD from the Systems Group at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Timothy Roscoe. In addition to work on the Barrelfish operating system, I was leading two projects during my PhD:

Selected work:

  • Shoal: A runtime for multicore machines that automatically tunes memory allocation and applies NUMA replication based on memory access patterns given by programmers or extracted by high-level compilers. During my time at Oracle, I helped include similar ideas to a production system as part of the PGX runtime.
  • Smelt: A framework to automatically build low-latency message-passing tree topologies for multicore machines based on simulation on the pairwise latency of all CPUs.
Details
Systems Group, ETH Zurich

IBM Research and Development

I wrote my diploma thesis at IBM Research and Development in Böblingen, where I investigated the Performance of the VSAM file system in the z/VSE mainframe operating system.

Awards:

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IBM

KIT: Karlsruhe Institue of Technology

Before my time in Zurich, I studied at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), during which I have been working as research assistant in humanoid robotics and sensor networking.

Notable work:

  • Bachelor thesis on building a tool for annotating objects in a 3D environment.
Karlruhe Institute of Technology
 

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