Short Bio

With over 15 years of experience in Virtualization technologies I am currently working on the lower-level parts of the stack to attack issues related to performance, scalability, power-efficiency and security in hypervisors. Since 2015 I have been affiliated with UK & EU firms, building & architecting solutions for efficient execution of workloads in the Cloud and at the Edge. I have been involved in many parts of the systems software stack, including device drivers, memory management, network/block layers etc.

Previously, I was a Post-doc at CSLab, NTUA, working on bridging the gap between common HPC practices and virtualization. My research interests include I/O Virtualization, systems software for high-performance I/O in virtualized environments, systems support for heterogeneous platforms, communication architectures for clusters, and scalable storage architectures based on clusters.

I hold a Diploma in Engineering (2006) from ECE, NTUA and a PhD in Computer Engineering (2013) from NTUA.

I have been involved in the academic research community for quite some time, serving as TPC member or external referee for various CS-related conferences and scientific journals. Since 2011, I co-organize the VHPC workshop series, held in conjunction with Europar, SC, and ISC.

Work experience

• Up2Metric S.A. - Cloud consultant

  Sep 2020  –  Aug 2021

  Container and Cloud consulting solutions for ML acceleration and orchestration.



• Mellanox Technologies LTD - Software / Systems Engineer

  May 2020  –  Jul 2020

  Design and develop a TMfifo virtual device to passthrough a physical QRNG device to a Bluefield PCIe SmartNIC.



• Nubificus LTD - Director & Systems Architect

  Apr 2020  –  present

  Nubificus Ltd is a software consultancy tackling complex virtualization problems. We explore lightweight virtualization solutions for edge, low power devices, aiming to bring Serverless and FaaS at the Edge.

  At Nubificus:

  • we enable hardware acceleration for Serverless Computing (https://vaccel.org)
  • we experiment with the systems software stack to reduce OS system overhead by enabling in-Kernel task isolation using virtualization techniques (in-kernel VMM)
  • we explore container runtimes to facilitate efficient workload placement in the Cloud and at the Edge, focusing on interoperability.



• Sunlight.io LTD - Researcher / Systems Engineer

  Jul 2018  –  Apr 2020

  Architecting, implementing, and optimizing a state-of-the-art hyperconverged hypervisor stack that achieves extreme storage and network performance.



• OnApp LTD - Researcher / Systems Engineer

  Feb 2015  –  Jun 2018

  Conducting research in emerging, power-efficient micro-server architectures on scalable network and storage I/O, and energy-driven resource management in Cloud architectures. This work consists of designing and implementing low-level hypervisor and OS mechanisms to provide applications efficient, isolated, and secure access to hardware resources.



• CSLab, ECE, NTUA - Postdoctoral Research Fellow

  May 2014  –  Jan 2015

  Worked on I/O Virtualization, systems software for high-performance I/O in virtualized environments, communication architectures for clusters, and scalable storage architectures based on clusters.



• NTUA - PhD in Computer Engineering

  Dec 2013  

  Efficient I/O Device Sharing in Virtualized Environments.
  As HPC applications scale to a large number of VMs, providing near-native network I/O performance to each peer VM is an important challenge. In this work, we present Xen2MX, a paravirtual interconnection framework, based on the Open-MX protocol, a port of the Myrinet/MX over generic Ethernet adapters. Experimental evaluation of our prototype implementation shows that Xen2MX is able to achieve nearly the same aw performance as Open-MX running in a non-virtualized environment.



• Mist.io Inc - Co-founder & Systems Engineer

  Jul 2013  –  Jan 2015

  Design, develop, deploy and maintain the company’s product. Mist.io is about cloud server management, monitoring and automation across multiple cloud providers from any web device. Code developing was in python, Javascript and bash.



• Maxeler Technologies LTD - Intern

  Sep 2011  –  Mar 2012

  Worked on porting the company’s custom FPGA boards to virtualized environments. As my task was completed quickly, I joined the hardware group working on the company’s new product line (MPCX), doing performance evaluation at first as well as kernel developing for the board’s interface driver and the networking stack (Infiniband)



• Unweb - Systems Engineer

  Jan 2011  –  Jul 2013

  Served as a systems engineer, deploying, administering and maintaining the company’s infrastructure both on bare-metal servers (co-located) as well as cloud servers (mostly Amazon EC2).



• CSLab, ECE, NTUA - Junior Researcher

  Apr 2007  –  Dec 2013

  For the purpose of my PhD thesis, I worked on scalable block-level storage systems, communication architectures for clusters, custom 10gigE interconnection frameworks and I/O Virtualization.



• ECE, NTUA - Dipl. Eng.

  Nov 2006  

  Design and impementation of a mechanism transfering data from storage devices to Myrinet networks bypassing the memory hierarchy.
  The objective of this study is the design and implementation of a framework that transfers data from local storage devices to Myrinet networks, bypassing the memory hierarchy of the system. Data flow from the storage device to the network, without touching the host’s memory subsystem.



• CC, ECE, NTUA - Senior Unix/Linux Administrator

  Oct 2005  –  Sep 2011

  Set up the entire lab (25-30 workstations, 5 servers), migrated from Solaris/SunOS 4.3 to Debian GNU/Linux, and maintained the lab which featured a fully autonomous setup, able to provide the necessary software for students to work on ECE school’s projects.



• PC Systems SA - Unix Engineer

  May 2004  –  Sep 2004

  Served as backend support for the company’s clients, mostly Solaris and some Linux-based setups.

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© 2021 Anastassios Nanos, based on ankitsultana.