Giorgos Kappes

Postdoctoral Researcher at Computer Systems Lab, UOI

Profile

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Ioannina in Greece.

I am Giorgos E. Kappes from Ioannina, Greece and, currently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Computer Systems Lab (CSL) of the University of Ioannina.
I have extensive experience in conducting research in Computer Systems. My research includes the design, development, and evaluation of system software for multi-tenant cloud environments. My research interests include operating systems, data storage, and systems security. I am also an expert in deployment and administration of enterprise-level IT infrastructure with over eight years of hands-on experience.

I hold a PhD in Computer Science, an MSc in Computer Systems, and a BSc degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, I completed my PhD and MSc under the supervision of Prof. Stergios Anastasiadis. In our research we studied approaches for efficient, effective, and secure support of multitenancy in the datacenters of modern cloud environments.
For more information about me, you can find my short resume in English, or my extensive corriculum vitae in Greek, and English.
You can also check my github, and gitlab profiles for a list of open source projects that I've contributed on.

Research

My main research interests lie in the fields of operating systems, data storage, and systems security. However, I am interested in pretty much everything to do with computer systems. Following are some of the projects that I have worked on:

User-level Services for Multitenant Isolation. The focus of this project is to enable multiple tenants to efficiently and securely share the computing, storage, and network infrastructure of the datacenter and reduce the conention for shared resources. To this end, we take the radical approach of moving the data-intensive I/O services at user level from the shared kernel, in order to serve the containers of competing tenants over the same cloud machines. Our contributions consist of innovative methods to handle POSIX-like system calls at user level through a library, the producer-consumer transfer of data and requests over shared memory with efficient memory copy and relaxed lock-free queues, the construction of stacked user-level I/O services, and a multitenant access control mechanism built natively into a distributed filesystem. our design.

Efficient, effective, and secure multitenancy. Secure access control is a challenging problem that organizations face in collaborative virtual environments, which has prevented many of them from migrating critical data or applications into these environments. In our research we examined approaches for efficient and effective support of multitenancy in filesystems used by virtual machines. We introduced a system architecture that is backwards compatible to object-based filesystems, and combines native access control with namespace isolation. Our architecture securely isolates dfferent tenants, and enables flexible file sharing both within and among tenants. We developed a Linux-based prototype solution over Ceph and obtained encouraging experimental results about the scalability and low overhead of our design on a local cluster and on Amazon AWS.

Feeding a desktop search engine with right results. The existing desktop search systems use web-based technologies, which are not optimal for desktop environments. To address this problem, some advanced desktop search systems create virtual links between files using methods that can generate too many false connections between files and also lead to performance bottlenecks due to the file connections that they maintain in a graph structure. In order to feed the search engine with the right results we developed a prototype filter driver over Windows NTFS to record important access characteristics of the local files.

OFIDIA - Operational Fire Danger Prevention Platform. The OFIDIA Project is Coordinated by the Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change, Lecce, Italy and funded by the European Territorial Cooperation Programme “Greece-Italy 2007-2013. Its main objective is to build a cross-border operational fire danger prevention infrastructure that advances the ability of regional stakeholders across Apulia and Ioannina Regions to detect and fight forest wildfires through more effective patrolling, environmental monitoring, weather modeling, fire danger forecasting and automated access to related historical data. (Project website, public version of Online Precision Weather Forecast for N.W. Greece)

OFIDIA2 - Operational Fire Danger Prevention Platform 2 OFIDIA2 is a European project funded by the Interreg V-A Greece-Italy Programme and motivated by the challenging problem of preventing and fighting wildfires in the forests and rural areas of Epirus and Apulia, as a result of climate change and socio-economic factors. It relies on the fruitful cooperation between scientific research, cutting-edge technologies, policymakers and Italian and Greek public agencies, with the objective of improving environmental safety and tackling wildfire risk. The maintenance of the natural environment is actually crucial due to the competitive advantages it offers in terms of biodiversity, tourist attraction, sustainable development and protection from natural catastrophes. (Project website, public version of Online Precision Weather Forecast 2 for N.W. Greece)

Publications and Talks

Following is a list of my recent publications and invited talks:

Journal Papers

  • Giorgos Kappes, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, A Family of Relaxed Concurrent Queues for Low-latency Operations and Item Transfers, ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing (TOPC), To appear.
  • Giorgos Kappes, Andromachi Hatzieleftheriou, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, Multitenant Access Control for Cloud-Aware Distributed Filesystems, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), Nov-Dec 2019, pg. 1070-1085. (IEEE, PDF).

Conference Papers

  • Georgios C. Androutsopoulos, Giorgos Kappes, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, Quantifying the Security Profile of Linux Applications, 14th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys 2023), Seoul, South Korea (to appear). (Paper).
  • Giorgos Kappes, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, Danaus: Isolation and Efficiency of Container I/O at the Client Side of Network Storage, ACM/IFIP Middleware International Conference (Middleware 2021), Virtual Event, Quebec, Canada, December 2021. (Paper, Presentation).
  • Giorgos Kappes, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, Asterope: A Cross-Platform Optimization Method for Fast Memory Copy. 11th ACM Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS 2021), Virtual Event, October 2021. (Paper, Presentation).
  • Giorgos Kappes, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, A Lock-free Relaxed Concurrent Queue for Fast Work Distribution, ACM Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming 2021 (PPoPP '21), Virtual Event, Republic of Korea, February 2021, pp. 454-456. (Paper, Presentation, Poster).
  • Giorgos Kappes, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, A User-level Toolkit for Storage I/O Isolation on Multitenant Hosts, ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2020 (SoCC '20), Virtual Event, USA, October 2020, pp. 74-89. (Paper, Presentation).
  • Giorgos Kappes, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, Libservices: Dynamic Storage Provisioning for Multitenant I/O Isolation, 11th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys 2020), Virtual Event, Tsukuba, Japan, August 2020, pp. 33-41. (Paper, Presentation).
  • Giorgos Kappes, Andromachi Hatzieleftheriou, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, Virtualization-aware Access Control for Multitenant Filesystems, IEEE International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST), Santa Clara, CA, USA, June 2014. (Paper, Presentation).

Magazines and Posters

  • Giorgos Kappes, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, Diciclo: Data-Intensive Container Isolation for Multitenant Clouds: Building user-level services for multitenant container storage, USENIX ;login:, December 2021, 7 pages. (Online, Paper).
  • Giorgos Kappes, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, A User-level Toolkit for Storage I/O Isolation on Multitenant Hosts, ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 2020 (SoCC '20), Renton, WA, USA, (virtual conference), October 2020. (Poster).

Technical Reports

  • Giorgos Kappes, Andromachi Hatzieleftheriou, Stergios V. Anastasiadis, Dike: Virtualization-aware Access Control for Multitenant Filesystems. Technical Report DCS2013-1, Department of Computer Science, University of Ioannina, February 2013. (Paper).

PhD Dissertation

  • User-level Services for Multitenant Isolation. Giorgos Kappes, thesis supervisor: Stergios V. Anastasiadis. PhD Dissertation, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Greece, June 2021. (Text).

Master's Thesis

  • Scalable Access Control for Secure Multi-Tenant Filesystems. Giorgos Kappes, thesis supervisor: Stergios V. Anastasiadis. Master Thesis, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Greece, October 2013. (Text, Presentation).

BSc Thesis

  • Logging File Access Patterns for a More Efficient File Search on Filesystems. Giorgos Kappes, Eirini Micheli, thesis supervisor: Stergios V. Anastasiadis. BSc Thesis, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Greece, October 2013. (Text in Greek).

Invited Talks

  • 15th TERENA TF-Storage Task Force Meeting, “Virtualization-aware Access Control for Multitenant Filesystems”, 22 September 2014. (Presentation).

Contact Me

Most likely you will find me at A34 office in the first floor of the department. If not, below is more information on how you can reach me.

I use GnuPG for email encryption and signing. I also use it to sign digital content that I create (such as code, documents, and my web pages). The ID of my personal GPG key is 0xD614E92E88507AE1. You can find the key on the SKS OpenPGP Public Key server and here: pubring, public key, fingerprint.
In case you would like to send me a confidential email, please use my key to secure it. Additionally, please sign the email with your signing key and provide me with your public key, so that I can verify your signature.

EMAIL
giorgos (at) giorgoskappes.com
g.kappes (at) uoi.gr
geokapp (at) gmail.com
PHONE
(+30) 2651008833
ADDRESS
Dep. of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Ioannina
Room A-34
45110 Ioannina, Greece