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Home > People > Galen Hunt
Galen Hunt

PRINCIPAL RESEARCHER
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I manage the Microsoft Research Operating Systems Group as Principal Researcher.  I also lead the Menlo project and the Singularity project. 

During a leave from MSR, I was the Group Program Manager for Windows Automated Deployment Services. My group created two of the core technologies for Microsoft's Dynamic Systems Initiative: the Dynamic Data Center and the System Definition Model.

Before that I was a Researcher in the Systems and Networking Group. I worked on the Millennium Project; Continuum, a distributed version of the .NET Framework; and Coign, a system that converted existing COM-based desktop applications into client-server distributed applications without access to application source code.

Previous interns who have worked for me include: César Spessot (2006), who ported a subset of SQL to Singularity; Mike Spear (2005), who created an entirely declarative I/O device driver configuration system for Singularity; Prince Mahajan (2004), who wrote a number of device drivers and a transacted file system for Singularity; Tom Roeder (2004), who worked on Singularity's application abstraction and installer; David Oppenheimer (1999), who built a distributed hash table on an unnamed research OS; and Rob Stets (1998), who created a distributed DCOM-based implementation of the Win32 API called COP (the Component-based OS Proxy).

I've worked on running DCOM over System Area Networks (SANs), the Detours package for instrumenting Windows binaries, and a proxy device driver for creating Windows NT user-mode drivers.

As a MSR summer intern, I developed the prototype for the protocol and implementation for what became, after reworking by a cast of thousands, Microsoft's Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) and Windows Media Player.

I have Ph.D. (1998) and M.S. (1996) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, a B.S. (1992) degree in Physics from the University of Utah, and an A.S. (1987) degree from Dixie College.

While at the University of Rochester, I was part of Michael Scott's Cashmere team developing fast Software Distributed Shared Memory (SDSM) systems on memory mapped networks. I also modified the GNU Compiler Collection Objective-C runtime to support full multi-threading.

Before graduate school, I lead software development at a small start-up, Software Migrations, Inc.. My greatest achievement at SMI was DPX, an advanced struct-mapping and data-migration tool. We rocked the tax-preparation software market by creating programs that automatically migrated tax records from one tax package to another. With just 5 people, we produced over 100 separate transfer programs each year and ate the lunch of everyone else in the business. It was an excellent experiment in leveraging automated software development tools.

As an undergraduate, I contributed to the Linux 0.11 text console driver. Before that, I started programming in C as a teenager.

Personal

Aside from systems research, my biggest interests are my wife, my daughter, my son, and church. My wife thinks I spend too much time with the computer; my daughter and son agree. They all smile when I come home from work and that makes me smile.

Professional Activities

Referred Publications

    2009

    2007

    • Galen C. Hunt and James R. Larus, Singularity: Rethinking the Software Stack, in ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 37-49, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., April 2007
    • Galen Hunt, Chris Hawblitzel, Orion Hodson, James Larus, Bjarne Steensgaard, and Ted Wobber, Sealing OS Processes to Improve Dependability and Safety, in Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., Lisbon, Portugal, March 2007

    2006

    2005

    1999

    1998

    1997

    Patents