Computer Engineering Commons^™

A Method For Comparative Analysis Of Trusted Execution Environments, Stephano Cetola

Dissertations and Theses

The problem of secure remote computation has become a serious concern of hardware manufacturers and software developers alike. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are a solution to the problem of secure remote computation in applications ranging from "chip and pin" financial transactions to intellectual property protection in modern gaming systems. While extensive literature has been published about many of these technologies, there exists no current model for comparing TEEs. This thesis provides hardware architects and designers with a set of tools for comparing TEEs. I do so by examining several properties of a TEE and comparing their implementations in several technologies. …

A Golden Age For Computing Frontiers, A Dark Age For Computing Education?, Christof Teuscher

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

There is no doubt that the body of knowledge spanned by the computing disciplines has gone through an unprecedented expansion, both in depth and breadth, over the last century. In this position paper, we argue that this expansion has led to a crisis in computing education: quite literally the vast majority of the topics of interest of this conference are not taught at the undergraduate level and most graduate courses will only scratch the surface of a few selected topics. But alas, industry is increasingly expecting students to be familiar with emerging topics, such as neuromorphic, probabilistic, and quantum computing, …

Dynamic Task Prediction For An Spmt Architecture Based On Control Independence, Komal Jothi

Dissertations and Theses

Exploiting better performance from computer programs translates to finding more instructions to execute in parallel. Since most general purpose programs are written in an imperatively sequential manner, closely lying instructions are always data dependent, making the designer look far ahead into the program for parallelism. This necessitates wider superscalar processors with larger instruction windows. But superscalars suffer from three key limitations, their inability to scale, sequential fetch bottleneck and high branch misprediction penalty. Recent studies indicate that current superscalars have reached the end of the road and designers will have to look for newer ideas to build computer processors.

Speculative …

A Toolkit For Specializing Production Operating System Code, Crispin Cowan, Dylan Mcnamee, Andrew P. Black, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole, Charles Krasic, Perry Wagle, Qian Zhang

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Specialization has been recognized as a powerful technique for optimizing operating systems. However, specialization has not been broadly applied beyond the research community because the current techniques, based on manual specialization, are time-consuming and error-prone. This paper describes a specialization toolkit that should help broaden the applicability of specializing operating systems by assisting in the automatic generation of specialized code, and {\em guarding} the specialized code to ensure the specialized system continues to be correct. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the toolkit by describing experiences we have had applying it in real, production environments. We report on our experiences with …

A Study Of Dynamic Optimization Techniques: Lessons And Directions In Kernel Design, Calton Pu, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Synthesis kernel [21,22,23,27,28] showed that dynamic code generation, software feedback, and fine-grain modular kernel organization are useful implementation techniques for improving the performance of operating system kernels. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, we discovered that there are strong interactions between the techniques. Hence, a careful and systematic combination of the techniques can be very powerful even though each one by itself may have serious limitations. By identifying these interactions we illustrate the problems of applying each technique in isolation to existing kernels. We also highlight the important common under-pinnings of the Synthesis experience and present our ideas on …

Parallel Architectures For Solving Combinatorial Problems Of Logic Design, Phuong Minh Ho

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis presents a new, practical approach to solve various NP-hard combinatorial problems of logic synthesis, logic programming, graph theory and related areas. A problem to be solved is polynomially time reduced to one of several generic combinatorial problems which can be expressed in the form of the Generalized Propositional Formula (GPF) : a Boolean product of clauses, where each clause is a sum of products of negated or non-negated literals.