Lionel Morel - Research

Publications

I’m (a little) sick of online bibliography management systems. I don’t want to rely on google … dblp is not really updating data quickly (ok, that’s a mild argument) … and even our national HAL system mixes some publications of an homonym into my own list, a problem which I have recently abandoned to try to solved.

Instead, I will update a pdf file with a sorted list of my publications.

Research topics

In the large, I’m interested in Compilation, Programming Languages and Runtime Support (including Operating Systems), Security, and “Low-Level” software activities (link with hardware, etc).

Current Activities

Recently, I’ve started to work within the newly created Phénix team where we are interested in re-designing operating systems and programming languages for addressing so-called frugality: the idea is that society cannot expect to keep increasing computing power indefinitely. Instead, we should try to think smaller (far smaller). Phénix tries to answer a broad question that can be posted as “How do we build minimalist computing systems that fulfill some desirable functionality?” [by desirable, we mean, eg wikipedia, but not video streaming 🙂 ]

If you’re interested, we have written a draft scientific project that can be downloaded here (in French), or you can access our group’s page here.

You can also read:

• A position paper we wrote (in french) for The Conversation.
• Our Bare Minimal Computer for Everyone paper at Undone Computer Science 2024.

Past Activities

From 2017 to 2020, I was a research engineer at CEA LIST, in Grenoble, where I worked on “compilation for cyber security”. Main keywords are Side-Channel Attacks, Fault-Injection Attacks, Software counter-measures (Masking, Hiding), Static and Dynamic Compilation.

In the (older) past, I’ve been working on Programming Models and Operating Systems for Embedded and Real-Time Systems. In particular Compilation and Runtime support for Dataflow Programming, Performance Analysis of Dataflow Programs

This activity was mainly run within the CITI lab, Socrate team.

In 2016, I received a COOPERA grant (cooperation program by the Rhône-Alpes region, link in French), for collaborating with colleagues at EPFL on the topic of performance analysis on NUMA architecture.

Past students

• Paul Ianneta (PhD, 2018-2022) Compiling Trees: Combining Data Layouts and the Polyhedral Model. Co-supervised with Laure Gonnord and Gabriel Radanne.
• Irénée Groz (M2R, 2018) : “Intégrité et confidentialité des programmes et des données pour les systèmes embarqués”.
• Paul Ianneta (M2R, 2018) Efficient Compilation of Data Structures for HPC Programs
• Manuel Selva (PhD, 2011-2015) : “Performance Monitoring of Throughput Constrained Dataflow Programs Executed On Shared-Memory Multi-core Architectures”. In collaboration with Bull SA, Échirolles. You can download his thesis.
• Tewodros Deneke (June-Dec 2014) : “Benefits of dataflow programming for the automatic distribution of video transcoders”. Tedy is doing is PhD on distribution of video transcoders at the Embedded Systems Lab, Åbo Akademy, Turku, Finland.
• Sebastian Bacanu, Kamil Deja, Max Thonagel (Undergrad R&D project, IST Semester, 2014-15): “Programming a Many-Core platform: experiences with the Kalray MPPA” [download report in PDF]
• Coralie Saysset (MSc, 2014) : “Evaluation of the Memory Footprint of Dataflow Programs”

Events

• April 2014: I organized a one-day seminar on Compilation and Execution of Streaming Programs. Check it out here!
• April 2024: Archipel

PhD

2005 — PhD in Computer Science – Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, FRANCE.

Title: Exploiting Regular Structures and Local Specifications for the Correct Development of Large Reactive Systems.

Jury:

• Jean Chassin de Kergommeaux, Full Professor, Université de Grenoble
• Marc Pouzet, Full Professor, LIP6-Univ. Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris-6
• Patrice Quinton, Full Professor, ENS Cachan
• Jean-Louis Colaço, Esterel Technologies
• Florent Maraninchi, Full Professor, Université de Grenoble (Advisor)