David Cock co-receives ACM Software System Award

David Cock, senior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Computer Science, is among those to receive the distinguished ACM Software System Award. The award has been granted for the development of the first industrial-strength, high-performance operating system to have been the subject of a complete, mechanically-checked proof of full functional correctness. With the presentation of this award, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) celebrates individuals whose work has impacted data center networks, software, algorithms, and AI.

David Cock completed his doctorate at the University of New South Wales & National ICT Australia. He joined the Institute for Computing Platforms at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich in 2015. As part of the Network and Operating Systems Group, he leads the project Enzian. Enzian is a research computer and is designed for computer systems software research and deliberately over-engineered. The goal of the project is, firstly, to explore the design space for computing platforms outside of commercially-available offerings and optimised industrial point solutions. The second goal is to provide a maximally flexible, high-performance platform for systems software and architecture research, and to make it available to the research community.

Besides conducting research, Cock also teaches in the area of advanced operating systems and informal methods. In 2019, David Cock already received the ACM SIGOPS 2019 Hall of Fame Award for a paper he co-authored ten years ago.