Datacenter operators rely on low-cost, high-density technologies to maximize throughput for data-intensive services with tight tail latencies. In-memory rack-scale computing is emerging as a promising paradigm in Scale-out datacenters capitalizing on Commodity SoC, low-latency and high bandwidth communication fabrics and a remote memory access model to enable aggregation of a rack’s memory for critical data-intensive ...

The design of specialized accelerators is essential to the success of many modern systems-on-chip. Electronic system-level design methodologies and high-level synthesis tools are critical for the efficient design and optimization of an accelerator. Still, these methodologies and tools offer only limited support for the optimization of the memory structures, which are often responsible for most ...

Users increasingly rely on crowd-sourced information, such as reviews on Yelp and Amazon, and liked posts and ads on Facebook. This has led to a market for blackhat promotion techniques via fake (e.g., Sybil) and compromised accounts, and collusion networks. Existing approaches to detect such behavior relies mostly on supervised (or semi-supervised) learning over known ...

Malware remains one of the most significant security threats on the Internet. Antivirus solutions and blacklists, the main weapons of defense against these attacks, have only been (partially) successful. One reason is that cyber-criminals take active steps to bypass defenses, for example, by distributing constantly changing (obfuscated) variants of their malware programs, and by quickly ...

The growing popularity of virtual machines is pushing the demand for high performance communication between them. Past solutions have seen the use of hardware assistance, in the form of “PCI pass-through” (dedicating parts of physical NICs to each virtual machine) and even bouncing traffic through physical switches to handle data forwarding and replication. In this ...

Clouds commonly store Virtual Machine (VM) images on networked storage. This poses a serious potential scalability bottleneck as launching a single fresh VM instance requires, at minimum, several hundred MB of network reads. As this bottleneck occurs most severely during read-intensive launching of new VMs, the authors focus on scalably minimizing time to boot a ...

WiFi-based Wireless LANs (WLANs) are widely used for Internet access. They were designed such that an Access Points (AP) serves few associated clients with symmetric uplink/downlink traffic patterns. Usage of WiFi hotspots in locations such as airports and large conventions frequently experience poor performance in terms of downlink goodput and responsiveness. The authors study the ...

The authors present FlowFox, the first fully functional web browser that implements a precise and general information flow control mechanism for web scripts based on the technique of secure multi-execution. They demonstrate how FlowFox subsumes many ad-hoc script containment countermeasures developed over the last years. They also show that FlowFox is compatible with the current ...

The authors present Odin, an SDN framework to introduce programmability in enterprise Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Enterprise WLANs need to support a wide range of services and functionalities. This includes authentication, authorization and accounting, policy, mobility and interference management, and load balancing. WLANs also exhibit unique challenges. In particular, Access Point (AP) association decisions ...

The effects of data center traffic characteristics on data center traffic engineering is not well understood. In particular, it is unclear how existing traffic engineering techniques perform under various traffic patterns, namely how do the computed routes differ from the optimal routes. The authors’ study reveals that existing traffic engineering techniques perform 15% to 20% ...