School of Computing Science

The GLAsgow Systems Section (GLASS) researches parallel and distributed systems, networked systems, and (safety-critical) software systems. The section is currently led by Dr Jeremy Singer. We have a strong focus on real-world systems, and cover all scales and across the hardware-software spectrum. We contribute to, develop, and release open-source research software. There are several research groups and labs within the section:

• GPG: The Glasgow Parallelism Group (led by Phil Trinder)
• Glasgow Carbon-Conscious Computing Lab (led by Lauritz Thamsen)
• Glasgow Cyberdefence Lab (led by Dimitrios Pezaros)
• Glasgow Intelligent Computing Lab (led by José Cano Reyes)
• Glasgow Internet Protocols Lab (led by Colin Perkins)
• Glasgow Programming Language Implementation Lab (led by Jeremy Singer)
• Networked Systems Research Lab (Netlab) (led by Dimitrios Pezaros)

Much of the research we undertake is collaborative and has industrial partners. We work closely with other groups in Computing Science as well as other schools including Engineering. We also work closely with other world-leading Universities and many private and public sector organisations (recently: Airbus, Arm, Cisco Systems, EDF, Ericsson, IETF, Microsoft Research, NASA).

Members of GLASS contribute to several of the school's cross-cutting research themes including: 

• Cyber Security for Digital Infrastructures and Technologies (Glasgow Cyber Defence Group)
• Computing Technologies for Healthcare
• Low Carbon and Sustainable Computing
• Progamming Languages
• Understandable Autonomous Systems

Academic Staff:

• Professor Dimitrios Pezaros (Professor of Computer Networks)
• Professor Phil Trinder (Professor of Computing Science)
• Professor Wim Vanderbauwhede (Professor in Computing Science)
• Professor Mark Logan (Professor in Practice)
• Dr Yehia Elkhatib (Reader)
• Dr Sye Loong Keoh (Associate Professor)
• Dr Lewis MacKenzie (Senior Lecturer)
• Dr Colin Perkins (Senior Lecturer)
• Dr Jeremy Singer (Reader, Section Lead)
• Dr Jose Cano Reyes (Senior Lecturer)
• Dr Anna Lito Michala (Lecturer)
• Dr Syed Waqar Nabi (Lecturer)
• Dr Chee Kiat Seow (Associate Professor)
• Dr Emma Li (Lecturer)
• Dr Dongzhu Liu (Lecturer)
• Dr Nguyen Truong (Lecturer)
• Dr Lauritz Thamsen (Lecturer)
• Dr Blair Archibald (Lecturer)
• Dr Awais Aziz Shah (Lecturer)
• Dr Thomas Zacharias (Lecturer)
• Dr Nikela Papadopoulou (Lecturer)
• Dr Paul Harvey (Lecturer)

Research Staff:

• Dr Dejice Jacob
• Ms Tania Wallis 
• Ms Laura Voinea
• Dr Ryo Yanagida
• Dr Marco Cook
• Mr Duncan Lowther
• Mr Mingwei Li
• Dr Filip Holik
• Dr Zhen Meng

Associate Staff:

• Dr Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa
• Dr Ornela Dardha 
• Professor Simon Gay 
• Dr Tim Storer
• Dr Yutian Tang

Honorary Staff:

• Dr John O'Donnell 
• Dr Natalia Chechina
• Dr Angelos Marnerides
• Dr Nikos Ntarmos

Research Students:

School of Computing Science PGR Student list

• Haruna Umar Adoga
• Wajdan Al Malwi
• Tahani Aladwani
• Ohud Alasmari
• Saleh Abdullah M Alfahad
• Abdullah Farhan J Alshammari
• Ghadeer Obaid F Alsharif
• Naila Azam
• Vivian Band
• Dan Chia
• Kelsey Collington
• Kai Feng
• Fatima Ghanduri
• Jude Haris
• Wenhao Hu
• Riziana Binti Ibrahim
• Teodor Karkashina
• Rech Leong
• Xicheng Li
• Qianyu Long
• Youssef Moawad
• Ivan Nikitin
• Yuxin Qin
• Rappy Saha
• Shivani
• Derek Somerville
• Robert Szafarczyk
• Zhuoran Tan
• Charles Varley
• Yuting Wan
• Qiyuan Wang
• Ruomeng (Cocoa) Xu
• Mihail Yanev
• Jinming Yang
• Rory Young
• Boning Zhang
• Kathleen West
• Nicholas Morris
• Martin Nahalka
• Jiabo Shi
• Elizabeth Boswell
• Yufeng Diao
• Sundas Rafat Mulkana
• Jiaming Yang

Current Projects:

• Cyber-Physical Teleoperation for Nuclear Decommissioning (Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Collaboration (RAICo) Programme, 2024-2025). Led by Emma Li and David Flynn.
• Digital Resilience for Critical National Infrastructure (RAEng, 2023-2028). Led by Dimitrios Pezaros.
• COoperative Cyber prOtectiON for modern power grids (Cocoon) (Horizon Europe, 2023-2026). Led by Dimitrios Pezaros and Awais Shah.
• M4Secure: making memory management more secure (EPSRC, 2023-2026). Led by Jeremy Singer.
• Assessment of the Strengths and Weaknesses of Current Tools and Techniques for Computer Forensics Applied to PLC/SCADA Systems (Series of projects, EDF Energy & Control and Instrumentation Nuclear Industries Forum (CINIF), 2023 - 2024). Led by Dimitrios Pezaros.
• AppControl (EPSRC Security by Design 1, 2020 - 2024). Led by Wim Vanderbauwhede and Jose Cano Reyes. Joint with Essex and Imperial.
• Capable VMs (EPSRC Security by Design 1, 2020 - 2024).  Led by Jeremy Singer.   
• Knowledge exchange agreement (Rakuten Mobile, Inc., 2020 - present ). Led by Colin Perkins and Jeremy Singer.
• STARDUST (EPSRC 2020 - 2024). Phil Trinder Co-I. In partnership with Imperial College London and the University of Kent: Laura Bocchi, Simon Gay, Simon Thompson, and Nobuko Yoshida.

Past Projects:

• Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards (EPSRC 2020 - 2023). Led by Colin Perkins.
• Emergence  of cybersecurity  capability  across  interdependent  critical  infrastructure, from the nexus of business, engineering and public policy interests. (2021 - 2022). Researcher Co-I Tania Wallis.
• Border Patrol (EPSRC, 2017 - 2022). Led by Wim Vanderbauwhede. Joint with Imperial College and Heriot-Watt Universities and EDF, ABB and Xilinx.
• Privacy Regulation and Compliance (Scottish Enterprise, 2020 - 2021). Led by Inah Omoronyia.
• Industry-funded project on Edge Analytics and service-oriented architecture. (2020 - 2021).
• Establishing a Scientific Baseline for Measuring the Impact of the NIS Directive on Supply Chain Resilience (RITICS & NCSC, 2019 - 2021). Researcher Co-I Tania Wallis. 
• HutZero6 Cybersecurity Entrepreneurs (DCMS, CYLON and Centre for Secured Information Technologies, 2020 - 2020) Led by Inah Omoronyia.
• CyberASAP 2: Privacy Engineering for Software Engineers (Innovate UK, 2019 - 2020). Led by Inah Omoronyia.
• BEST (2019 - 2020). Co-lead with Jeremy Singer, and Pieter Koopman.
• Improving Protocol Standards for a more Trustworthy Internet” (EPSRC 2018-2020). Led by Colin Perkins. 
• CyberASAP 1: Privacy Engineering for Software Engineers (Innovate UK, 2019 - 2019). Led by Inah Omoronyia.
• Distributed swarm intelligence for network control over centrally-orchestrated future infrastructures (Huawei Innovation 2018 - 2019). Led by Dimitris Pezaros.
• FRUIT project, (EPSRC, 2017-2019) Chaired by Jeremy Singer. 
• Glasgow Network Functions for Unmanned Vehicles. (EU H2020 2018 - 2018). Led by Christos Anagnostopoulos. 
• Network Measurement as a Service (NMaaS) (EPSRC 2016 - 2020). Led by Dimitris Pezaros.
• MaRIONet Network (EPSRC 2016-2019). Led by Jeremy Singer and Phil Trinder.
• A Situtation-Aware Information Infrastructure (SAI2) (EPSRC 2015 - 2017). Co-I Dimitris Pezaros.
• Exploiting Parallelism through Type Transformations for Hybrid Manycore Systems (TyTra) (EPSRC SADEA 2014 - 2019). Led by Wim Vanderbauwhede.
• Instrumentation, Measurement, and Control for the Cloud (IMC2) (EPSRC 2014 - 2015). Led by Dimitris Pezaros 
• From Data Types to Session Types: A Basis for Concurrency and Distribution (EPSRC 2013 - 2018) Led by Simon Gay.
• Adaptive JIT-based Parallelism (AJITPar) (EPSRC SADEA 2013 - 2017). Led by Phil Trinder.  
• AnyScale Apps (EPSRC SADEA 2013 - 2017). Led by Jeremy Singer.
• COST Action IC1201: Behavioural Types for Reliable Large-Scale Software Systems (BETTY) (EC, 2012 - 2016). Chaired by Simon Gay. 
• The University of Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud project (2012-2016). Led by Jeremy Singer.
• CLOPEMA (EC FP7 2012 - April 2015).
• WebRTC: Media Transport Protocols and Adaption (Ericsson, 2012 - 2015). Led by Colin Perkins. 
• RELEASE: A High-Level Paradigm for Reliable Large-Scale Server Software (EU FP7, 2011 - 2015). Co-I Phil Trinder
• Robust Video Streaming over IP (Cisco, 2010 - 2012).
• Understanding and Reporting on IPTV Behaviour (Cisco, 2010-2012).
• HPC-GAP: High Performance Computational Algebra and Discrete Mathematics (EPSRC 2009 - 2013). Co-I Phil Trinder.

Members of GLASS built YewPar: software aimed at providing general-purpose, distributed memory, parallel skeletons for combinatorial search problems, e.g. finding the largest clique in a graph. 

Systems seminars are usually held on Tuesdays. Everyone from the University of Glasgow and beyond is welcome to attend these talks - see the Events tab for more details. We are happy to hear from anyone that would like to visit us to give a talk.

The Systems seminar is coordinated by Dr Ryo Yanagida. 

July 2024

• Congratulations to our PhD student Kathleen West, who won the Best Poster Award at the 2024 SICSA PhD Conference for her poster “Towards Carbon-Aware Execution of Scientific Workflows.” Check out SICSA's tweet with a photo of Kathleen and the award here!
  
  
• Great news for cybersecurity from Dr. Tomas Zacharias who has had two papers accepted for publication! A paper titled "Are continuous stop-and-go mixnets provably secure?” is to appear this month at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2024, and a paper on "Blockchain Bribing Attacks and the Efficacy of Counterincentives" is to appear at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2024.   

Members of the Systems section helped design and build Glasgow Parallel Haskell (GpH). It's one of the early robust parallel functional languages, and remains one of the most widely used parallel Haskell models, e.g. the most popular Haskell compiler, GHC supports it on multicores. The sophisticated GUM runtime system supports GpH on distributed-memory machines like clusters. The new GUMSMP runtime system supports GpH on hierarchical architectures like NUMAs or clusters of multicores. 

Members of the Systems section helped design and build Haskell distributed parallel Haskell (HdpH). It's a parallel Haskell for large scale distributed-memory machines like clusters or HPC platforms. Crucially, HdpH is implemented in vanilla (GHC) Haskell. 

Glasgow Network Functions (GNF) - Members of the section have developed an open-source, container-based Network Function Virtualization (NFV) framework that allows the transparent attachment of virtual Network Functions (NF)s to selected traffic in Software-Defined Networks.

Extending the matching abilities of OpenFlow - Members of the section have developed a protocol-independent, flexible alternative to today’s OpenFlow fixed match fields based on the Berkeley Packet Filters (BPF) for packet classification.

SDN-based Virtual Machine Management for Cloud Data Centers - Members of the section have developed a SDN-based software orchestration framework for live Virtual Machine (VM) management that exploits temporal network information to migrate VMs and minimise the network-wide communication cost of the resulting traffic dynamics.