UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ruslan Nikolaev, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Penn State, has been awarded a five-year, $656,226 U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project, “Comprehensive approaches to designing systems with higher performance, scalability, and security.” The project aims to design a new operating system that combines performance, security and concurrency while also optimizing operating systems to support the next generation of computing.
Q: What do you want to understand or solve through this project?
Nikolaev: Although computers have changed dramatically over the years, many of the operating systems, which control how the computer processes information, are still built around design principles developed decades ago. Modern processors contain computing cores that can execute work simultaneously, a concept known as concurrency; storage and networking hardware are much faster than they once were; and cyberattacks against operating systems have become increasingly sophisticated. These changes raise a fundamental question: If we were designing an operating system today, what would it look like?
This project explores a new approach to operating system design that treats performance, security and concurrency as a single problem rather than three separate ones. For decades, operating system designers have faced difficult tradeoffs in achieving these goals. Different operating system architectures have addressed these challenges in different ways, with some emphasizing performance and compatibility, others emphasizing isolation and security, and still others enabling applications to interact more directly with hardware. This project aims to bring together the advantages of these different approaches in a new operating system that can provide both strong isolation and high performance.
Q: How could advances in this area impact society?
Nikolaev: Operating systems are the software foundation of virtually every computing platform, from laptops, smartphones and cloud data centers to scientific computing systems and the infrastructure behind many online services. This means improvements to operating systems can benefit a wide range of technologies that people rely on every day.
This research aims to improve future operating systems speed, reliability and security while preserving compatibility with existing software. If successful, the ideas developed through this project could influence both open-source and commercial operating systems, helping shape how future computing platforms are built.
We also plan to release the code as open-source software, meaning it will be publicly available for researchers, students and industry engineers to build on our work. We hope this will foster collaboration, accelerate innovation and strengthen the broader open-source systems community.
Q: Will undergraduate or graduate students contribute to this research? How?
Nikolaev: Yes. The project will provide opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students to participate in research and education. The graduate student supported by the project will play a central role in designing the new operating system architecture, developing secure and scalable system software and evaluating its performance on modern computing platforms. I also hope to involve additional graduate and undergraduate students through research collaborations, independent study projects and volunteer contributions to the project's open-source software.
The project also includes a new hands-on graduate course that integrates operating systems, security and concurrency. These are three subjects that are often taught separately, even though they are closely connected in modern computing. Students will work directly with the open-source software developed through the project, gaining practical experience building and evaluating real operating system components.
Q: The NSF CAREER award not only funds a research project, but it also recognizes the potential of the recipient as a researcher, educator and leader in their field. How do you hope to fulfill that potential?
Nikolaev: The CAREER award provides an opportunity to build the long-term research and education program I have envisioned at Penn State. As a researcher, I want to help shape the future of operating systems by bringing together ideas from operating systems, computer security and concurrent programming that have traditionally evolved as separate fields.
As an educator, I want to fundamentally rethink how operating systems are taught. Modern computing challenges rarely fit neatly into one discipline, so I plan to develop a new course and hands-on experiences that help students understand how performance, security and concurrency interact in real systems.
As a leader, I hope to create an environment where students, researchers and software engineers can work together to solve challenging systems problems. By building an active research group, developing open-source software and contributing to the broader systems community through collaborations, workshops and outreach, I want to help advance both research and education. The CAREER award makes it possible to pursue this long-term vision over the next five years.
This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under award number 2543448. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funders.
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