I am a co-investigator of an open-source research project which aims to build an operating system known as Stardust that supports the deployment of Cloud services. Stardust is a Library Operating System (LibOS) that permits a service to execute in a virtual, light-weight and secure environment on top of a hypervisor. It also features a multi-core pre-emptive scheduler, provides common device drivers and relies on standard libraries that supports a number of computer programming languages including C, C++ and Java. This project is now being used in supporting the teaching and research activities at the University of St Andrews. I also contributed to related projects including Stardust-oxide which is a Rust-based Unikernel and Duster which is a small debugger for para-virtualised Unikernels written in C that run on the Xen hypervisor.
During my doctoral studies, I engineered a decentralised service orchestration system for managing data-intensive workflows. Using a heuristic approach that relies on real-time analysis of the network condition, this system provides the ability to split workflows into smaller parts then be deployed onto the most appropriate network locations for execution in order to reduce the overall data transfer between distributed resources and improve performance. I also designed a functional data coordination programming language that permits data flows between distributed services to be specified using high-level abstractions. This enables workflows written in this language to be translated using a generative compiler into a highly scalable form which consists of smaller executable components that can be transmitted to remote locations for execution. The language compiler provides the ability to detect parallelism automatically by analysing the data flow dependencies between computational tasks. The design of this language has been published in peer-reviewed academic articles and documented in my doctoral thesis.
Research Grant
Ward Jaradat, Alan Dearle, and Jonathan Lewis. Unikernel Support for the Deployment of Light-weight, Self-contained, and Latency Avoiding Services. 3rd Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, 2018. Abstract only.
Ward Jaradat, Alan Dearle, and Adam Barker. Towards an Autonomous Decentralised Orchestration System. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2016. Invited journal paper to the Special Issue of Big Data and Smart Computing: Methodology and Practice.
Ward Jaradat. On the Construction of Decentralised Service-oriented Orchestration Systems. Doctoral Dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2015.
Ward Jaradat, Alan Dearle, and Adam Barker. Workflow Partitioning and Deployment on the Cloud using Orchestra. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing, pages 251-260, IEEE Computer Society, 2014. Acceptance Rate (38/198): 19%.
Ward Jaradat, Alan Dearle, and Adam Barker. A Dataflow Language for Decentralised Orchestration of Web Service Workflows. In Proceedings of the 9th IEEE World Congress on Services, pages 13-20, IEEE Computer Society, 2013.
Ward Jaradat, Alan Dearle, and Adam Barker. An Architecture for Decentralised Orchestration of Web Service Workflows. In Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Web Services, pages 603-604, IEEE Computer Society, 2013.
The Case for Unikernels. In the Fourth Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2019.
Towards Unikernel Support for Distributed Microservices. Adobe Tech Summit, San Francisco, United States of America, 2019.
Unikernel support for the deployment of light-weight, self-contained, and latency avoiding services. The 3rd Annual UK System Research Challenges Workshop, United Kingdom, 2018.
On Engineering Unikernels, Systems Seminars Series, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom, 2018.
Decentralised Orchestration of Service-oriented Workflows, Systems Seminar Series, University of St Andrews.
A Dataflow Language for Decentralised Orchestration of Web Service Workflows, Scottish Programming Languages Seminar (SPLS), 2013.