I am currently working at Software Innovation AS in Oslo from June 2012. Software Innovation creates document management software for both the public and private sector. In July 2012 I finished my master’s thesis at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. From summer 2010 to 2011 I spent one year at the University of California, San Diego. Here my main focus was on parallel programming, while also taking courses in computer graphics.

At Software Innovation, I currently work on mobile front-end applications for the company’s product portfolio, as well as the backend for these applications. I’ve previously developed a semi-cross-platform HTML5+Javascript app, published on Google Play here, but are now occupied with application development on the Windows 8 “metro-style” app platform.

Publications and academic work

Master’s thesis: Case Studies in Multi-core Energy Efficiency of Task Based Programs (July 2012)

For my master’s thesis I studied the energy efficiency of the Intel Sandy Bridge-series CPU and the ARM Cortex A9 quad-core CPU. Black-Scholes formula evaluation, FFTW and matrix-martrix multiplications were chosen as benchmarks, each optimized with both scalar and vector instructions. Energy efficiency is presented in total energy used, GFLOPS/W, the energy-delay product and the energy-delay squared product.

I’ve made my master’s thesis available here. My thesis was nominated for the NR-prize for the best thesis in Computer Science of 2011-2012. NR is the Norwegian abbreviation for the Norwegian Computing Center.

Paper: Case Studies of Multi-core Energy Efficiency in Task Based Programs

This paper is largely based on my thesis, presenting the energy efficiency results for the Intel Sandy Bridge series processor. The paper was presented at the conference ICT-GLOW 2012 in , Vienna, Austria, September 6, 2012. My thesis includes the paper as an appendix, and can also be found here. Lasse Natvig, Abdullah Al Hasib and Jan Christian Meyer were co-authors of the paper.

Graduate project: Procedural Generation of Roads for use in the Snow Simulator

In Fall of 2011, I did a graduate project on automatic road generation through terrains. Students at the HPC lab at NTNU has developed a GPU-accellerated physics simulator simulating falling snow flakes in a wind field. I extended the simulator with road generation, which, in addition to the demo effect, could be used to study the effects of snow on the optimal road trajectories in a terrain.

The road trajectories were found using an implementation of the A* path finding algorithm to find a shortest path through a discretized height map. A cost function of the height differences, curvature and road length were used. The discrete shortest path was converted into an actual road trajectory by using each vertex as a control point in a clothoid parametrized curve.

My report for the project is available here, and I’ve got a git repository here.

Internships

In summer 2011, I worked at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) as a summer intern where I developed software for integrity checking files stored on the disk servers at the CERN on-campus data center. Tapes are used as the main storage medium for the enormous amounts of data gathered from the different experiments, with a harddisk cache consisting of about 1500 servers that sits between the users and the tapes. In order to detect data corruption, a checksum is stored with the files which is checked continuously by the software I developed.

In addition to the integrity checking daemon, I developed a monitoring agent that gathers statistics from the integrity checks that is integrated with CERN’s Lemon (“LHC Era Monitoring) system. Statistics include the number of files checked, and the number of bad checksums. I also developed a web-based monitoring tool in Django which parses the logs from the integrity checks and presents them, allowing the sysadmins to see both details like what files have been corrupted, and patterns like what servers (or even which clusters) are failing the most.

In the Summer of 2009 and 2010, I worked at Software Innovation as an intern. In 2010 I developed an internal tool/dashboard/taskboard for bug- and feature tracking for the developers at the company.

In 2009, I was working with one other intern at Software Innovation on developing a cloud-based application for public journal, based on the Windows Azure platform. As the Azure platform was quite young at that time, part of the task was to research the technology and storage solutions. The application was one of two winners in an Azure competition that Microsoft had going on at that time. (Link)