Hardware and the OS
The cloud might abstract away the hardware and OS layers on which it’s built, but at some point, the success of all computing, even the cloud, relies on the interdependencies between hardware features and the software OS that exposes those features to applications. With edge computing advancing and the performance and scale requirements of cloud, new hardware types are rapidly evolving and software innovation must keep pace. We are very interested in projects that amplify hardware innovation and especially in projects that push software-defined capabilities forward.
Projects
| Project | Summary | Research Area | RIG | Universities | hf:tax:rig | hf:tax:partner_university |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CoDes : A co-design research lab to advance specialized hardware projects | CoDes research lab provides the infrastructure and engineering foundation needed to support co-design based specialized hardware research. The lab is currently located at Boston University, as part of the Red Hat – Boston University collaboratory. | AI-ML, Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| FHELib: Fully Homomorphic Encryption Hardware Library for Privacy-preserving Computing | Note: Please visit the Privacy-Preserving Cloud Computing using Homomorphic Encryption project page for information on a related project. In today’s … | Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS, Security, Privacy, Cryptography | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Security and safety of Linux systems in a BPF-powered hybrid user space/kernel world | With the introduction of BPF into the Linux kernel, we are seeing a sea change in the traditional application model. With BPF it is now possible to execute parts of the application logic in kernel space, leading to a novel hybrid userspace/kernel model. This is an exciting development that brings with it many opportunities, but also some challenges especially in the area of security. We have recently seen an example of this around the “kernel lockdown” functionality in the kernel, which would disable BPF entirely in its “confidentiality” mode. | Hardware and the OS, Security, Privacy, Cryptography | Europe | Karlstad University | brno | karlstad-university |
| Open-Source Toolchain Optimization for FPGA CAD | Additional details to be added soon! Project Poster Link to full size project poster | Hardware and the OS | North America | UMass Lowell | greater-boston | umass-lowell |
| Tuning the Linux kernel | The Linux kernel is a complicated piece of software with multiple components interacting with each other in complex ways. The … | AI-ML, Hardware and the OS | North America | greater-boston | ||
| AI for Cloud Ops | This project aims to address this gap in effective cloud management and operations with a concerted, systematic approach to building and integrating AI-driven software analytics into production systems. We aim to provide a rich selection of heavily-automated “ops” functionality as well as intuitive, easily-accessible analytics to users, developers, and administrators | AI-ML, Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| DISL: A Dynamic Infrastructure Services Layer for Reconfigurable Hardware | As modern data center workloads become increasingly complex, constrained and critical, mainstream “CPU-centric” computing can no longer keep pace. Future … | Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Practical Programming of FPGAs with Open Source Tools | This project has evolved from the Practical programming of FPGAs in the data center and on the edge project. Please see … | Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Near-Data Data Transformation | BU faculty members Manos Athanassoulis and Renato Mancuso will work with Red Hat researchers Uli Drepper and Ahmed Sanaullah to create a hardware-software co-design paradigm for data systems that implements near-memory processing. | Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Towards high performance and energy efficiency in open-source stream processing. | BU faculty members Vasiliki Kalavari and Jonathan Appavoo will work with Red Hat researcher Sanjay Arora to create an open-source … | Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Privacy-Preserving Cloud Computing using Homomorphic Encryption | Note: Please visit the FHELib: Fully Homomorphic Encryption Hardware Library for Privacy-preserving Computing project page for information on a related … | Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS, Security, Privacy, Cryptography | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Linux Computational Caching | In this speculative work we are attempting to explore a biologically motivated conjecture on how memory of past computing can be stored and recalled to automatically improve a system’s behavior. | AI-ML, Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Symbiotes: A New step in Linux’s Evolution | This work explores how a new kind of software entity, a symbiotie, might bridge this gap. By adding the ability for application software to shed the boundary that separates it from the OS kernel it is free to integrate, modify and evolve in to a hybrid that is both application and OS. | Hardware and the OS, Security, Privacy, Cryptography | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Robust Data Systems Tuning | Note: Please see the Learned Cost-Models for Robust Tuning project page for research that has grown from this project. See … | AI-ML, Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Robust LSM-Trees Under Workload Uncertainty | We introduce a new robust tuning paradigm to aid in the design of data systems with uncertain assumptions by modeling the behavior of the system and then utilizing these models in conjunction with techniques in robust optimization. Our approach is demonstrated through tuning a popular log-structured merge-tree based storage engine, RocksDB | Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Building the next generation of programmable networking – powered by Linux | The project seeks to explore areas related to programmable networking, with a particular focus on the eXpress Data Path (XDP) technology in the Linux kernel. | Hardware and the OS | Karlstad University | karlstad-university | ||
| OpenInfra Labs | OpenInfra Labs is an OpenStack Foundation project connecting open source projects to production to advance open source infrastructure. The project … | AI-ML, Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS, Security, Privacy, Cryptography, Testing and Ops | Boston University, Northeastern University, UMass Amherst | boston-university northeastern-university umass-amherst | ||
| Open Cloud Testbed | The Open Cloud Testbed project will build and support a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud platforms – the underlying software which provides cloud services to applications. Testbeds such as OCT are critical for enabling research into new cloud technologies – research that requires experiments which potentially change the operation of the cloud itself. | AI-ML, Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS, Security, Privacy, Cryptography, Testing and Ops | North America | Boston University, Northeastern University, UMass Amherst | greater-boston | boston-university northeastern-university umass-amherst |
| Outfitting QEMU/KVM with Partitioning Hypervisor Functionality | This project extends the virtualization capabilities of QEMU and KVM by adding partitioning hypervisor functionality. With this implementation, hardware resources can be exclusively assigned to specific tasks and VMs. Current work supports KVM Isolation IOCTLs to query CPUs to find isolated CPUs. | Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| An Optimizing Operating System: Accelerating Execution With Speculation | To optimize performance, Automatically Scalable Computation (ASC), a Harvard/BU collaboration attempts to auto-parallelize single threaded workloads, reducing any new effort required from programmers to achieve wall clock speedup. SEUSS takes a different approach by splicing a custom operating system into the backend of a high throughput distributed serverless platform, Apache OpenWhisk. SEUSS uses an alternative isolation mechanism to containers, called Library Operating Systems (LibOSs). | Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Kernel Techniques to Optimize Memory Bandwidth with Predictable Latency | Recent processors have started introducing the first mechanism to monitor and control memory bandwidth. Can we use these mechanisms to enable machines to be fully used while ensuring that primary workloads have deterministic performance? This project presents early results from using Intel’s Resource Director Technology and some insight into this new hardware support. The project also examines an algorithm using these tools to provide deterministic performance on different workloads. | Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Unikernel Linux | This project aims to turn the Linux kernel into a unikernel with the following characteristics: 1) are easily compiled for any application, 2) use battle-tested, production Linux and glibc code, 3) allow the entire upstream Linux developer community to maintain and develop the code, and 4) provide applications normally running vanilla Linux to benefit from unikernel performance and security advantages. | Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Fuzzing Device Emulation in QEMU | Hypervisors—the software that allows a computer to simulate multiple virtual computers—form the backbone of cloud computing. Because they are both ubiquitous and essential, they are security-critical applications that make attractive targets for potential attackers. | Hardware and the OS, Security, Privacy, Cryptography, Testing and Ops | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Practical programming of FPGAs in the data center and on the edge | FPGAs are now essential components in the data center and on the edge with millions deployed. FPGAs are found in a wide variety of system elements and provide such critical functions as SDN, encryption/decryption, and compression. Yet for nearly all system providers, much less system users, programming these FPGAs is impossible. Our overall goal is to enable FPGA application development by High Level Language (HLL) programmers, especially for the data center and the edge, and exclusively using existing open-source tools. | AI-ML, Cloud-DS, Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Automatic Configuration of Complex Hardware | In this project, we pursue three goals towards this understanding: 1) identify, via a set of microbenchmarks, application characteristics that will illuminate mappings between hardware register values and their corresponding microbenchmark performance impact, 2) use these mappings to frame NIC configuration as a set of learning problems such that an automated system can recommend hardware settings corresponding to each network application, and 3) introduce either new dynamic or application instrumented policy into the device driver in order to better attune dynamic hardware configuration to application runtime behavior. | Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |
| Quest-V, a Partitioning Hypervisor for Latency-Sensitive Workloads | Quest-V is a separation kernel that partitions services of different criticality levels across separate virtual machines, or sandboxes. Each sandbox encapsulates a subset of machine physical resources that it manages without requiring intervention from a hypervisor. In Quest-V, a hypervisor is only needed to bootstrap the system, recover from certain faults, and establish communication channels between sandboxes. | Hardware and the OS | North America | Boston University | greater-boston | boston-university |