Computer architecture, including energy efficiency, reliability, security

Hardware / Software Systems: Computational techniques are now a major innovation catalyst for all aspects of human endeavor. Our research aims to develop tomorrow’s information technology that supports innovative applications, from big data analytics to the Internet of Things.

Hardware/Software Systems covers all aspects of information technology, including energy efficient and robust hardware systems, software defined networks, secure distributed systems, data science, and integrated circuits and power electronics.

Subareas

• Energy-Efficient Hardware Systems
• Software Defined Networking
• Mobile Networking
• Secure Distributed Systems
• Data Science
• Embedded Systems
• Integrated Circuits and Power Electronics

Energy-Efficient and Robust Hardware Systems: The exponential growth in performance and storage capacity has been the key enabler for information technology for decades. However, the end of voltage scaling in semiconductor chips has made all computer systems, from mobile phones to massive data centers, energy limited. Moreover, new nanosystems enabled by emerging nanotechnologies provide unique opportunities for revolutionizing energy-efficient architectures through new transistor and memory technologies and their massive and fine-grained three-dimensional integration. These shifts motivate new system architectures and vertical co-design of hardware, system software, and applications. We look at new ways to design, architect, verify, and manage highly energy-efficient systems for emerging applications ranging from imaging and computer vision, machine learning, internet-of-things and big data analytics. Design of robust systems that overcome complexity, reliability and security challenges are also explored.

Examples include:

• Hardware design for specialized accelerators and programming models for heterogeneous computing;
• Scalable hardware verification and system validation;
• Scalable architectures with thousands of computing elements and massive memory capacity;
• Hardware architectures and systems software for cloud computing;
• Architectures for nanosystems enabled by emerging technologies;
• Robust and trustworthy architectures.

Secure Distributed Systems: An increasing amount of computation is now hosted on private and public clouds, backed by warehouse-scale datacenters. At the same time, web-scale applications such as search, social networks, and software-as-a-service, are changing not just the way we use information, but also the way that people interact with each other. We are investigating next generation computation, storage, and communication platforms that enable and simplify the development of such applications. Moreover, we are developing novel security architectures, exploring new attack vectors, and experimenting with new user interfaces is important, necessary work for enhancing the security of computer systems. Examples include:

• Low latency data center technologies;
• Resource efficient cloud computing;
• Software platforms for coordinating swarms of smart objects and connecting them with web-scale services;
• Network and web security protocols, operating system and hardware support for security, security through programming language paradigms, cryptography;
• Security for embedded devices;
• New applications for cloud computing, e.g., distributed graphics.