Since March 1st 2026, Boris Koldehofe has been a full professor at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and is responsible for the research team on Distributed Systems. The DS research team (formerly DSOS at TU Ilmenau) will remain working in the core area of distributed systems, focusing on topics related but not limited to
Distributed Computing
Cloud Computing
Computer Networks
Middleware
The DS research team will also continue its mission to develop network-accelerated distributed computing methods to support high-performance and energy-efficient computing for emerging intelligent computer systems. In particular, the DS research team will pursue its engagement in the Ilmenau School of Green Electronics.
The CogniGron Research Center and the Distributed Systems Research Groups of TU Ilmenau and University of Groningen have organized a workshop to discuss research findings, initiatives, and challenges for Sustainability in Distributed and Networked Systems.
Researchers from the University of Groningen, TU Ilmenau, and TU Darmstadt met to exchange on initiatives like the CogniGron research center, the Ilmenau School of Green electronics, the collaborative research center MAKI, and a new project on green business process management. Furthermore, the workshop enabled in the form of excellent presentations of young researchers to exchange research findings towards sustainability in distributed and networked systems by taking the hardware and software perspectives. A particular highlight of the workshop was the dissertation talk of Saad Saleh on „Methods and Design for Analog Computing Architectures Memristors for Enhancing Expressiveness and Energy-Efficiency of Packet Processors. “ Saad Saleh successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on Jan 7.
Workshop Program:
09:00 Welcome and Overview
09:10 Introduction of Research Teams of Darmstadt, Ilmenau and Groningen
Prof. Ralf Steinmetz: Future Internet Research at the Collaborative Research Center MAKI
Prof. Beatriz Noheda (UG): The CogniGron Research Center at the University of Groningen
Prof. Alexander Lazovik: Research overview at Groningen, Distributed Systems
Prof. Boris Koldehofe: Research overview at Ilmenau
10:30–10:50 Coffee/tea break
10:50–12:15 Network and Hardware centric perspective
Dr. Peter Amthor (TU Ilmenau): The Ilmenau School of Green Electronics
On February 1st, Boris Koldehofe was appointed by the president of TU Ilmenau, Prof. Dr. Kai Uwe Sattler, as Professor of the university. He will be heading the Distributed Systems and Operating Group at the Faculty of Computer Science and the Institute of Applied Computer Science. Boris Koldehofe will continue to collaborate with the University of Groningen and remains a TU Darmstadt fellow as part of the CRC MAKI.
Saad Saleh presented a novel memory architecture TCAmMCogniGron at the IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing, 2022. The proposed architecture TCAmMCogniGron is designed to replace a highly energy intensive memory, named Ternary content addressable memory (TCAM), used in almost all current network switches and routers to store processing rules and forward traffic through the Internet. TCAmMCogniGron enables the general purpose integration of special energy saving materials, named Memristors, which allow to keep the processing rules in form of a state, often represented in form of resistance, and this state is non-volatile. In collaboration with Anouk S. Goossens and Tamalika Banerjee from Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials characteristics of a physical memristor built at the CogniGron research center were studied. The findings demonstrate the high energy efficiency and extreme resiliency of the proposed design. The research concluded that in addition to supporting non-volatile state so-called match and mismatch operations require only about 1–16 femtojoules of energy.
Interested to learn more about the potential of memristive devices to a more energy-friendly Internet, please check out the following research works including a recent survey studying the use of memristive devices for performing energy efficient operations using novel computing architectures in the Internet.
Saad Saleh and Boris Koldehofe. On Memristors for Enabling Energy Efficient and Enhanced Cognitive Network Functions. IEEE Access, 34 pages, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3226447
Congratulations to Manisha Luthra! Manisha was awarded with a dissertation award for her PhD thesis “Network-centric Complex Event Processing” by the German Special Interest group on Communications and Distributed Systems (KuVs) of “Gesellschaft für Informatik” (GI).
Dissertation Ceremony of Manisha in 2021
Manisha Luthra was co-advised by Ralf Steinmetz und Boris Koldehofe in the context of the DFG Collaborative Research Center MAKI. Manisha is now Postdoctoral researcher at the Systems Group of TU Darmstadt. Furthermore, she started recently a new position as senior researcher at the SAIDE Lab of German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) led by Carsten Binnig.
The Rosalind Franklin Fellow program of the University of Groningen has opened several positions as Tenure Track Assistant/Associate Professor for female researchers with three positions at the Bernoulli Institute. One position is dedicated to distributed or network-centric systems research. Candidates with a strong background in this area can apply via the RUG online application portal until Oct 27th 2022.
Saad Saleh presented his research on Memristor-based Cognitive and Energy Efficient In-network computing at the Brainspiration 2022 conference, University of Twente, Netherlands. The conference focused on brain-inspired concepts and materials for information processing.
The motivation for brain-inspired computing emerges from the current generation of computers which huge amounts of energy resources and lack cognitive functionality which is critical for many applications like self-driving cars. In this regard, the CogniGron research center at the University of Groningen has developed materials, called memristors, which consume less energy resources and provide cognitive functionality similar to the human brain. Saad presented the use of these cognitive materials for the Internet components and showed various design models and techniques for incorporating cognitive functionality inside the Internet. Preliminary results have shown promising power consumption statistics of these materials for Internet components requiring little (16 uW during operational mode) to no energy consumption (during standby mode).
The speakers and attendees at the conference included renowned scientists and researchers from academia and industry including Beatriz Noheda (CogniGron), Julie Grollier (Thales), John Paul Strachan (Forschungszentrum Jülich), Abu-Sebastian (IBM), Andrea Liu (UPenn), Wilfred Gerard (UT), Wolfram Pernice (Heidelberg University), and researchers from HP labs (USA), Sandia National Labs (USA), AMOLF (NL).
This research is in collaboration with Anouk Goossens and Tamalika Banerjee from Zernike Institute of Advanced Materials, University of Groningen. For more information about this research, contact Saad Saleh or Boris Koldehofe (Adviser).
Young system researchers, e.g., Ph.D. students and PostDocs, can now apply for the EuroSys 2023 Shadow PC until October 12th.
A Shadow PC is meant to allow young researchers to obtain insight into the review process of major conferences. Typically, the review process of a big conference like EuroSys is rather intransperrant to young researchers. Therefore, it isn’t easy to understand what requires excellent research work to be accepted.
In a shadow PC (shadowing the programm commitee), young researchers actively review the research papers submitted to the conference. In EuroSys, papers submitted to the conference will also be assigned to members of the shadow PC for review with the permission of the authors. In addition, the shadow PC will determine and discuss its own ranking of submitted papers. Although the outcome will and must not impact the decision of the conference program committee, the discussion allows the researchers to obtain in-depth experience in the review process. Moreover, the reviews will also provide, in many cases, additional helpful feedback to the authors.
