About me

I am a PhD student at the Computer Systems Institute of ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Thomas R. Gross. My research is concerned about better understanding and better exploiting the performance potential of multi-core processors with a non-uniform memory architecture. I am experimenting with methods of memory allocation and thread scheduling for this class of machines. My approaches frequently rely on dynamic feedback from the performance monitoring unit of the CPU.

Originally I come from Cluj/Klausenburg/Kolozsvár/Claudiopolis/Kloiznburg, Romania. I graduated at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in 2007. Before graduating, I did my diploma project at ETH Zurich about integrating a software transactional memory into a Java Virtual Machine. My supervising assistant was Nicholas D. Matsakis. Before joining ETH Zurich in September 2008 I was a network engineer, and later a teaching assistant at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.

Publications

• Zoltan Majo, Thomas R. Gross. A Template Library to Integrate Thread Scheduling and Locality Management for NUMA Multiprocessors. 4th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism (HotPar 2012).
  [pdf] [bibtex]
• Zoltan Majo, Thomas R. Gross. Matching Memory Access Patterns and Data Placement for NUMA Systems. International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO 2012).
  [pdf] [bibtex] [pptx]
• Zoltan Majo, Thomas R. Gross. Memory Management in NUMA Multicore Systems: Trapped between Cache Contention and Interconnect Overhead. International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM 2011).
  [pdf] [bibtex] [pptx] [ppt]
• Zoltan Majo, Thomas R. Gross. Memory System Performance in a NUMA Multicore Multiprocessor. The 4th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR 2011).
  [pdf] [bibtex] [pptx] [ppt]
• Irina Tuduce, Zoltan Majo, Adrian Gauch, Brad Chen, Thomas R. Gross. Asymmetries in Multi-Core Systems -- Or Why We Need Better Performance Measurement Units. The Exascale Evaluation and Research Techniques Workshop (EXERT) at ASPLOS 2010.
  [pdf] [bibtex]

Teaching

SS 2012 - Advanced Compiler Design
HS 2011 - Design of Parallel and High-Performance Computing
SS 2011 - Advanced Compiler Design; Research Topics in Software Engineering
HS 2010 - Compiler Design 1
SS 2010 - Parallel Programming
HS 2009 - Parallel Programming Practice
SS 2009 - Parallel Programming
HS 2008 - Software Engineering Seminar

Talks (some of the files are accessible only from inside the ETHZ network)

• May 7, 2012 - Technical University of Cluj-Napoca -- Performance Optimizations for NUMA-Multicore Systems [pptx]
• May 2, 2011 - Apáczai Csere János High School - Multicore Processors: Advantages and Challenges (in Hungarian) [pptx]
• April 26, 2010 - Institute of Computer Systems Seminar - ASPLOS 2010 Trip Report [pdf]
• November 30, 2009 - Institute of Computer Systems Seminar - Memory Bandwidth on the Intel Nehalem

Student Projects

Open Projects

If you are interested in doing a semester/master/diploma project, please look at the list of project proposals. Come and talk to me if you need more information or you have suggestions.

Supervised Projects

• Ivo Steinmann (December 2012): Performance of Irregular Workloads in a NUMA-Multicore Environment
• Ivo Steinmann (September 2011): Evaluating the Cost of Data Migration in a NUMA-Multicore Architecture
• Ankush Gupta (October 2010): A Performance Model and its Evaluation for Java on a Multi-Core System

Last updated on: May 9, 2012