Publications by Pascal Felber | EPFL Graph Search

Promoting Computational Thinking Skills in Non-Computer Science Students Gamifying Computational Notebooks to Increase Student Engagement

Pascal Felber, Denis Gillet, Adrian Christian Holzer, Juan Carlos Farah, Marc Lafuente Martinez

Computational thinking (CT) skills are becoming increasingly relevant for future professionals across all domains, beyond computer science (CS). As such, an increasing number of bachelor and masters programs outside of the computer science discipline integ ...

2022

A Canvas for the Ethical Design of Learning Experiences with Digital Tools

Pascal Felber, Denis Gillet, Patrick Jermann, Roland John Tormey, Adrian Christian Holzer, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Cécile Hardebolle

The use of digital tools has drastically increased in engineering education, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These tools generate important ethical issues, in particular in terms of privacy and fairness. However, very few teacher training programmes ...

2022

NVCache: A Plug-and-Play NVMM-based I/O Booster for Legacy Systems

Pascal Felber, Rafael Pereira Pires

This paper introduces NVCache, an approach that uses a non-volatile main memory (NVMM) as a write cache to improve the write performance of legacy applications. We compare NVCache against file systems tailored for NVMM (Ext4-DAX and NOVA) and with I/O-heav ...

IEEE2021

Malware in the SGX supply chain: Be careful when signing enclaves!

Pascal Felber, Rafael Pereira Pires

Malware attacks are a significant part of the new software security threats detected each year. Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) are a set of hardware instructions introduced by Intel in their recent lines of processors that are intended to provide a ...

2022

OneFile: A Wait-free Persistent Transactional Memory

Pascal Felber, Nachshon Cohen

A persistent transactional memory (PTM) library provides an easy-to-use interface to programmers for using byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM). Previously proposed PTMs have, so far, been blocking. We present OneFile, the first wait-free PTM with in ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2019

Elastic transactions

Pascal Felber, Rachid Guerraoui, Vincent Gramoli

This paper presents elastic transactions, an appealing alternative to traditional transactions, in particular to implement search structures in shared memory multicore architectures. Upon conflict detection, an elastic transaction might drop what it did so ...

Academic Press Inc Elsevier Science2017

CoFeed: privacy-preserving Web search recommendation based on collaborative aggregation of interest feedback

Pascal Felber, Martin Rajman, Vinh Toan Luu

Search engines essentially rely on the structure of the graph of hyperlinks. Although accurate for the main trend, this is not effective when some query is ambiguous. Leveraging semantic information by the mean of interest matching allows proposing complem ...

Wiley-Blackwell2013

Atomic boxes: coordinated exception handling with transactional memory

Pascal Felber, Vincent Gramoli

In concurrent programs raising an exception in one thread does not prevent others from operating on an inconsistent shared state. Instead, exceptions should ideally be handled in coordination by all the threads that are affected by their cause. In this pap ...

2011

Why STM can be more than a Research Toy

Pascal Felber, Rachid Guerraoui, Aleksandar Dragojevic, Vincent Gramoli

Software Transactional Memory (STM) promises to simplify concurrent programming without requiring specific hardware support. Yet, STM’s credibility lies on the extent to which it enables to leverage multicores and outperform sequential code. A recent CACM ...

2011

On the Input Acceptance of Transactional Memory

Pascal Felber, Vincent Gramoli

We present the Input Acceptance of Transactional Memory (TM). Despite the large interest for performance of TMs, no existing research work has investigated the impact of solving a conflict that does not need to be solved. Traditional solutions for a TM to ...

World Scientific Publishing2010

Extensible Transactional Memory Testbed

Pascal Felber, Vincent Gramoli

Transactional Memory (TM) is a promising abstraction as it hides all synchronization complexities from the programmers of concurrent applications. More particularly the TM paradigm operated a complexity shift from the application programming to the TM prog ...

2010

Elastic Transactions

Pascal Felber, Rachid Guerraoui, Vincent Gramoli

This paper presents elastic transactions, a variant of the transactional model. Upon conflict detection, an elastic transaction might drop what it did so far within a separate transaction that immediately commits, and initiate a new transaction which might ...

Springer2009

Toward a Theory of Input Acceptance for Transactional Memories

Pascal Felber, Vincent Gramoli

Springer2008

Workshop on Transactional Computing (TRANSACT 2008) - Introduction

Pascal Felber, Babak Falsafi

2008