Projects
Project Summary RIG Universities rig_hfilter partner_university_hfilter Advanced Proactive Caching for Heterogeneous Storage Systems This project targets improving the performance of distributed storage systems, such as Ceph, by developing novel caching frameworks that (1) … Israel Ben Gurion University tel-aviv ben-gurion-university Automated detection of memory safety vulnerabilities in Rust In comparison to C, the Rust language provides significant memory safety guarantees through its concept of lifetimes and its borrow-checker. … Greater New England Columbia University greater-boston columbia-university Tuning the Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a complicated piece of software with multiple components interacting with each other in complex ways. The … Greater New England greater-boston Disinformation Detection at Scale The increased prevalence of fake and manipulated visual media on the Internet has led to social and technical dilemmas in … Greater New England UNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, University of Notre Dame greater-boston unicamp-universidade-estadual-de-campinas university-of-notre-dame Characterizing and optimizing reactive systems, a continuum language-runtime This research project was kicked off by a paper we published in REBLS 2021. This paper aimed at comparing the costs and benefits of three different reactive streams libraries for Java: do mature and complex libraries implementing involved optimizations perform better than newer libraries sacrificing such optimizations for a simpler codebase? Europe brno 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 Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Creating a global open research platform to better understand social sustainability using data from a real-life smart village In this project, a team of BU faculty will team up with Red Hat researchers and with SmartaByar, an organization … Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university DISL: A Dynamic Infrastructure Services Layer for Reconfigurable Hardware BU faculty member Martin Herbordt will work with Red Hat researchers Uli Drepper and Ahmed Sanaullah to create a generic … Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Practical Programming of FPGAs with Open Source Tools BU faculty member Martin Herbordt will work with Red Hat researchers Uli Drepper and Ahmed Sanaullah to create an open … Greater New England 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. Greater New England 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 … Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university OSMOSIS: Open-Source Multi-Organizational Collaborative Training for Societal-Scale AI Systems The goal of our project is to develop a novel framework and cloud-based implementation for facilitating collaboration among highly heterogeneous research, development, and educational settings. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Privacy-Preserving Cloud Computing using Homomorphic Encryption In today’s data-driven world, a large amount of data is collected by billions of devices (cell phones, autonomous cars, handheld … Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Serverless Streaming Graph Analytics In this project, we will focus on graph streams that can be used to model distributed systems, where workers are represented as nodes connected with edges that denote communication or dependencies. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Enabling Intelligent In-Network Computing for Cloud Systems With the network infrastructure becoming highly programmable, it is time to rethink the role of networks in the cloud computing … Greater New England 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. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Foundations in Open Source Education In this project we are developing an exemplar set of materials for an introductory computers systems class that exploits, Jupyter, Jupyter Books, OpenShift and the the Mass Open Cloud to develop and deliver a unique educational experience for learning about how computer systems work. Greater New England 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. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Intelligent Data Synchronization for Hybrid Clouds The goal of this project is to design configurable synchronization solutions on a common platform for a wide range of edge computing scenarios relevant to Red Hat. These solutions will be thoroughly validated on a state-of-the-art testbed capable of emulating realistic environments (e.g., smart cities). Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Secure cross-site analytics on OpenShift logs The project aims to explore whether cryptographically secure Multi-Party Computation, or MPC for short, can be used to perform secure cross-site analytics on OpenShift logs with minimum client participation. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Robust Data Systems Tuning BU faculty members Manos Athanassoulis and Evimaria Terzi will work on building a new robust tuning framework for LSM-based data … Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Test Case Prioritization: Towards Efficient and Reliable Continuous Integration Automatic regression testing is a crucial step of any CI/CD pipeline. Its primary goal is to detect bugs and defects introduced by recent changes as early as possible while keeping verification costs at a very low level. The goal of the TCP project is to create a novel ML-based tool that solves the TCP (Test Case Prioritization) problem in software regression testing. Israel Reichman University tel-aviv reichman-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 Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university PHYSICS: oPtimized HYbrid Space-time servIce Continuum in faaS PHYSICS is a high technology European research project with total funding of about 5ML€ proceeding with a consortium of 14 … Europe, Israel brno tel-aviv SpotOS – a distributed cloud-based operating system over unreliable resources The aim of this project is to devise and implement a distributed cloud-based operating system that uses unreliable or temporarily … Israel Technion tel-aviv technion Does efficient, private, agnostic learning imply efficient, agnostic online learning? Users of online services today must trust platforms with their personal data. Platforms can choose to enable privacy by default … Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Are Adversarial Attacks a Viable Solution to Individual Privacy? Users of online services today must trust platforms with their personal data. Platforms can choose to enable privacy by default … Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Secured API in Hybrid Cloud Recently we see many companies that are moving their data from local data centers to public-managed clouds. But with these movements, some questions raise up. Israel Ariel University tel-aviv ariel-university Side-channel attacks on embedded devices and smartcards This project focuses on several aspects of side-channel attacks on embedded devices and smartcards, utilizing timing, power-analysis and other side-channels. … Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university Big Data Stack EU Project: An European Open Source Initiative The Big Data Stack EU research project aims at providing a complete infrastructure management system, which bases the management and deployment decisions on data from current and past application and infrastructure deployments. It focuses on: Israel tel-aviv Mining issued Common Criteria and FIPS140-2 certificates The security certification reports might be long but is also a trove of publicly available data about otherwise proprietary devices … Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university Kubernetes Optimized Service Discovery Across Clusters The Submariner project provides an ability to connect multiple Kubernetes clusters into a secure shared network which allows various services to communicate with each other. Israel Reichman University tel-aviv reichman-university Smart Commute Because an individual’s driving style has an impact of ~25/30% on the CO2 emissions and carpooling can save up to … Domestic Violence Tracker An issue with COVID-19 is the lack of financial ability to escape domestic violence. This does not mean the victims … OpenVolunteerPlatform The OpenVolunteerPlatform provides community support by improving food security and access to resources amongst vulnerable populations. The platform helps to … 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. Karlstad University karlstad-university Verifying constant-time cryptographic algorithm implementations The aim of this project is to verify the timing side-channel resistance of cryptographic implementations. The project focuses on the constant time (and constant memory access) generic cryptographic implementations of selected cryptographic algorithms. T Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university Trusted Computing Ecosystem The project aims to study the TPM ecosystem as currently exists in deployed devices and software applications using it, establish the types of chips and their properties one can encounter, investigate the state of patching of known vulnerabilities like ROCA against Infineon’s TPM (CVE-2017-15361) or TPMFail against Intel’s fTPM (CVE-2019-11090) and STM’s TPM (CVE-2019-16863) and analyze a reliability of stored integrity measurements (PCRs) for remote attestation and disk encryption uses. Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university Improving Full Disk Encryption The primary focus of this project is also data integrity protection, either in combination with encryption (authentication encryption) or standalone using dm-integrity and dm-verity kernel driver. Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university Accelerating Microarchitectural Security Research We are working on processes and tooling to lower the barrier to entry into the field and accelerate attack research and mitigation across academia and industry. Europe Graz University of Technology brno tu-graz Authentication in public open-source repositories This project focuses on user authentication in public repositories containing open-source projects, which are then used by commercial companies (e.g. Red Hat) as a source for their internally maintained repositories. Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university LART – LLVM Abstraction and Refinement Tool The goal of this tool is to provide LLVM-to-LLVM transformations that implement various program abstractions. Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university Adaptive Learning of Programming The mission of Adaptive Learning of Programming is to make learning more efficient and engaging by personalizing educational systems using artificial intelligence techniques. Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university Workflow-Centric Tracing for Cloud Applications Workflow-centric tracing allows traces (i.e., graphs) of requests’ workflows to be constructed by stitching together trace points with the same request context. Three collaboratory projects focus on improving the observability and diagnosability of Red Hat products using this technique. Greater New England Boston University, Northeastern University greater-boston boston-university northeastern-university Hybrid Cloud Caching A fundamental goal of the Hybrid Cloud Cache project is to allow simplified integration into existing data lakes, to enable caching to be transparently introduced into hybrid cloud computation, to support efficient caching of objects widely shared across clusters deployed by different organizations, and to avoid the complexity of managing a separate caching service on top of the data lake Greater New England Boston University, Northeastern University greater-boston boston-university northeastern-university Volume Storage Over Object Storage This project creates a hybrid storage system composed of a high-speed local device (e.g. Optane) to store short term data, along with a write-once object store (e.g, Ceph RGW) to store data blocks permanently. Greater New England Boston University, Northeastern University greater-boston boston-university northeastern-university Kariz Cache Prefetching and Management Kariz is a caching system that works closely with analytic frameworks scheduler to find the best caching policy for the current running application. Greater New England Boston University, Northeastern University greater-boston boston-university northeastern-university PACT: Private Automated Contact Tracing Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university OpenInfra Labs OpenInfra Labs is an OpenStack Foundation project connecting open source projects to production to advance open source infrastructure. The project … Boston University, Northeastern University, UMass Amherst boston-university northeastern-university umass-amherst Elastic Secure Infrastructure This project encompasses work in several areas to design, build and evaluate secure bare-metal elastic infrastructure for data centers. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university 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. Greater New England Boston University, Northeastern University, UMass Amherst greater-boston boston-university northeastern-university umass-amherst Ceph Storage This research project is investigating how Ceph compression and erasure coded pools could optimize Prometheus tsdb storage. Greater New England UMass Lowell greater-boston umass-lowell Implementing Secure Multi-Party Computing Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) is a cryptographic primitive that allows several parties to jointly and privately compute desired functions over secret data. Building and deploying practical MPC applications faces several obstacles, including performance overhead, complicated deployment and setup procedures, and adoption of MPC protocols into modern software stacks. MPC applications expose trade-offs between efficiency and privacy that may be hard to reason about, formally characterize, and encode in a protocol design or implementation. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university 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. Greater New England 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). Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Open CEP – An Advanced Open Source Complex Event Processing Engine The aim of this project is to create a scalable open-source complex event processing (CEP) framework. Israel Technion tel-aviv technion Ceph: Wire-Level Compression-Efficient Object Storage Daemon Communication for the Cloud The project’s purpose is to reduce storage network traffic (object, block, etc.) for the following cases: between the failure domains in cost-sensitive environments such as public clouds, and between nodes in cases where the network bandwidth is the bottleneck of the node performance. Israel Reichman University tel-aviv reichman-university Innovation Scorecard: Controlling framework for innovation projects in IT Innovation Scorecard is a conceptual performance measurement and management control framework specifically designed for work activities that relate to innovation. Its origin lies in the outcomes of a primary research project that was supported by the Czech Scientific Foundation during 2013-2015. This project’s objective was to ascertain whether organizations in the Czech Republic measure the efficiency of their innovations and what metrics they applied to measure these. Results confirmed that organizations that constantly managed innovation were engaged in identifying performance measurements to determine the level of value and benefits associated with innovation. Europe Brno University of Technology brno brno-university-of-technology 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. Greater New England 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. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Code2Vec: Learning code representations This project analyzed semantic similarities of learned code embeddings parsed from open source python libraries such as numpy, pandas and sklearn. Still in progress is another analysis that learns code embeddings in a supervised manner with the C++ codebase for performance measurement of program execution in CPU with performance counters (e.g. LLC misses to L1 requests, Cycles Per Instruction). Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Perun: Lightweight Performance Version System Perun is an open source light-weight Performance Version System, which works as a wrapper over existing Version Control Systems and in parallel manages performance profiles corresponding to different versions of projects. Moreover, it offers a tool suite suitable for automation of the performance regression test runs, postprocessing of existing profiles or effective interpretation of the results. Europe Brno University of Technology brno brno-university-of-technology DiffKemp: Automatic analysis of semantic differences in kernel options The project aims at creating a tool for automatic analysis of differences in the code between versions of the Linux kernel. The goal is to determine whether the semantics (the effect) of some kernel option, function, or parameter, changed between two kernel versions Europe Brno University of Technology brno brno-university-of-technology Symbiotic Symbiotic is an open-source framework for program analysis integrating instrumentation, static program slicing and various program analysis tools. Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university Vega Project The Vega Project team at Red Hat came up with an idea to harness the power of Kubernetes to provide the next-generation open-source tool for high-performance computing. The project is way past the design phase, and the team is already working on the proof-of-concept implementation using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-university Quality Assurance System for Internet of Things Technology The main goal is to design, implement and verify a framework for quality assurance of products based on the Internet of Things concept. The aim of the framework is to help individual IoT projects to establish an efficient testing and verification strategy of the infrastructure. The proposed framework is based on a model of the IoT infrastructure, composed of methodological part, driven by university team, and a technical part, mainly worked on by Red Hat engineers. Europe Czech Technical University brno czech-technical-university AUFOVER – The Automation of Formal Verification The goal of the Automation of Formal Verification (AUFOVER) project is to develop automated formal verification tools and integrate them for industrial use. The tools to be developed or improved within the projects are Verification Server, Verification Server Client Application, csmock plug-ins, DIVINE, Symbiotic and Testos. The purpose of the grant is to finish the development of university tools based on formal mathematical methods and their transfer to a commercial environment, including integration with industrial partners’ tools and incorporation of these tools into the commercial processes for software verification. Europe Brno University of Technology, Masaryk University brno brno-university-of-technology masaryk-university Usable Security for Developers This project focuses on the cryptographic APIs with respect to their developer usability. Such APIs are notoriously complex and prone to usage errors – our goal is to analyze their (in)correct usage and propose precautions and guidelines to achieve better usability and security. Europe Masaryk University brno masaryk-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. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university D3N: A Multi-Layer Cache for Data Centers This project designs and develops D3N, a novel multi-layer cooperative caching architecture that mitigates network imbalances by caching data on the access side of each layer of hierarchical network topology. A prototype implementation, which incorporates a two-layer cache, is highly-performant (can read cached data at 5GB/s, the maximum speed of our SSDs) and significantly improves the performance of big-data jobs. Greater New England Boston University, Northeastern University greater-boston boston-university northeastern-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. Greater New England 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. Greater New England 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. Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university Avocado Project The goal of the Avocado project, as a generic test automation framework, is to provide a solid foundation for software projects to build their testing needs on. With Avocado, common testing problems are solved at the framework level, and developers can spend more of their time writing tests that, by default, will adhere to best practices. Europe Czech Technical University, Karlstad University brno czech-technical-university karlstad-university Performance Management for Serverless Computing Serverless computing provides developers the freedom to build and deploy applications without worrying about infrastructure. Resources (memory, cpu, location) specified … Greater New England Boston University greater-boston boston-university