A photo of me.
Nick Wanninger

Ph.D. Researcher at Northwestern University

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University advised by Peter Dinda. Before that, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Illinois Tech, where I worked with Kyle Hale.

I am currently interested in enabling new memory management systems in unmanaged languages like C and C++ through modifications in both the compiler and runtime systems. I am also very interested in kernel and runtime support for specialized programming models. I enjoy finding novel ways of enabling new programming models by adding support at the lowest levels of the kernel. I'm working on an operating system, Chariot where I prototype and hack on ideas I might have.

Recently, I've been working on Alaska, a compiler and runtime technique to enable object mobility in unmanaged languages. You can see the code here and the paper here.


Publications

Virtualization So Light, it Floats! Accelerating Floating Point Virtualization

Authors:
Nick Wanninger, Nadharm Dhiantravan, Peter Dinda
Venue:
HPDC - Notre Dame, Indiana
Date:
2025.07.20
Tags:
virtualizationfpvmemulation

Getting a Handle on Unmanaged Memory

Authors:
Nick Wanninger, Tommy McMichen, Simone Campanoni, Peter Dinda
Venue:
ASPLOS'24 - San Diego, United States
Date:
2024.04.27
Tags:
alaskacompilersruntimeobject mobilityhandles

Compiling Loop-Based Nested Parallelism for Irregular Workloads

Authors:
Yian Su, Mike Rainey, Nick Wanninger, Nadharm Dhiantravan, Jasper Liang, Umut A. Acar, Peter Dinda, Simone Campanoni
Venue:
ASPLOS'24 - San Diego, United States
Date:
2024.04.27
Tags:
compilersparallelism

CARAT KOP: Towards Protecting the Core HPC Kernel from Linux Kernel Modules

Authors:
Thomas Filipiuk, Nick Wanninger, Nadharm Dhiantravan, Carson Surmeier, Alex Bernat, Peter Dinda
Venue:
ROSS (at SC'23) - Denver, United States
Date:
2023.11.12
Tags:
kernelcompilers

FPVM: Towards a Floating Point Virtual Machine

Authors:
Peter Dinda, Nick Wanninger, Jiacheng Ma, Alex Bernat, Charles Bernat, Souradip Ghosh, Christopher Kraemer, Yehya Elmasry
Venue:
HPDC - Minneapolis, Minnesota
Date:
2022.06.27
Tags:
virtualizationfpvmemulation

Isolating Functions at the Hardware Limit With Virtines

Authors:
Nick Wanninger, Josh Bowden, Kirtankumar Shetty, Ayush Garg, Kyle Hale
Venue:
EuroSys - Rennes, France
Date:
2022.04.05
Awards:
Gilles Muller Best Artifact Award, Illinois Tech Best Paper Award
Tags:
virtualizationcompilersruntimes