Projects

Undergrad Projects for Computer Scientists

Graded Monads for Efficient Database Implementations

Functional programming languages such as Haskell make it easy to express database queries using list comprehensions. For instance, the SQL query

SELECT name, amount FROM customers, invoices WHERE cid = cust AND due < today

can be written in Haskell as the following one-liner:

[ (c.name, i.amount) |c ←customers, i ←invoices, c.cid i.cust, i.due < today ]

This approach is highly convenient: monads allow us to concisely express fairly complex operations over lists. However, this simplicity comes at a cost—such implementations are often inefficient. A more performant alternative is to use indexed tables, which can be viewed as finite functions of type Key -> [Value]. While this representation improves efficiency, it sacrifices the ability to compose queries elegantly using monads.

This project will address this trade-off by implementing an efficient database representation based on graded monads, thereby retaining compositionality while improving performance.

OS Development

Markix is an operating System I developed when I was little. It is a bare bone operating system for x86 architectures written in Assembly and C and runs on x86 or the bochs emulator. The idea is to have something more minimal than Minix so that students can understand every component of an operating system in isolation.
Hence, Markix is built in incremental stages. Each milestone corresponds to a Git tag, and improvements to that module are developed on dedicated branches.

TagComponentDescription
BootloaderBootloaderInitializes the CPU in real mode, loads the kernel, and switches to protected mode
InterruptsInterrupt SystemImplements the 8259 PIC, IDT setup, and interrupt service routines (ISRs)
KeyboardPS/2 DriverHandles keyboard input and interrupt handling
SchedulerProcess SchedulerRound-robin scheduling and context switching
PagingMemory ManagementGDT, paging tables, and memory protection setup
FilesystemGRUBFile SystemBasic FAT filesystem and GRUB integration

Download the source code from my GitHub page. Software needed: NASM Compiler, C Compiler with support for cross compiling to i386 architectures, Bochs, GNU Debugger (gdb).

Weak Memory Concurrency

Amongst other things I also helped the weak memory concurrency community in fixing some problem with the C++ and Java concurrency model.

The work which we published at ESOP’20’ is being considered for the next ISO standard of C++.

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Other Projects B.Sc. and M.Sc. Projects for Computer Scientists

Undergrad topics for Mathematicians

TBA.