On January 28, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent No. US 10,547,681 B2 to Dr. Tian Lan and his colleagues for “Functional Caching in Erasure Coded Storage.” Dr. Jerry Comanescu at GW's Technology Commercialization Office facilitated the prosecution of the patent application.
Category: News
Dr. Lan has received a three-year, $300,000 research grant from the Office of Naval Research
Dr. Tian Lan has received a three-year, $300,000 research grant from the Office of Naval Research. The project, titled “SIFT: Scheduling Interactive Flows to Tame Performance Tails,” will develop novel theories and scheduling algorithms for optimizing interactive traffic flows in edge/cloud networks to meet challenging performance tail objectives.
The IEEE Communications Society has re-appointed Dr. Suresh Subramaniam as IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for a second two-year term
Dr. Suresh Subramaniam completed an IEEE Distinguished Lecture Tour of Japan and Korea during the week of November 18. The lecture was titled “The Evolution of Datacenter Network Architectures,” and it discussed the latest advances in leveraging optical switching within datacenters to enable high throughputs, low latencies, and low power consumption. The tour included lectures at Sapporo (November 19), Yokohama (November 20), Osaka (November 21), and Seoul (November 22).
And the IEEE Communications Society has re-appointed Dr. Suresh Subramaniam as IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for a second two-year term, running from January 2020 to December 2021.
Dr. Subramaniam completed an IEEE Distinguished Lecture Tour of Australia
Dr. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) completed an IEEE Distinguished Lecture Tour of Australia the week of March 11. The title of his lecture was “The Evolution of Data Center Network Architectures.” He gave lectures arranged by the following IEEE chapters: New South Wales (Wollongong, March 12, and Sydney, March 13), South Australia (Adelaide, March 14), and Victoria (Melbourne, March 15).
Dr. Venkataramani receives new patent
On January 22, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted Dr. Guru Venkataramani and his former Ph.D. student, Jie Chen, US Patent #10,185,824 for the invention “System and Method for Uncovering Covert Timing Channels.” The invention identifies hardware events in computer processors behind timing channel-based information leakage attacks, and has innovative hardware algorithm designs to detect these security attacks during system runtime. These timing channels were exploited in the now infamous Meltdown and Spectre widely reported in the news earlier this year. The inventions span detection of timing channel activity in both combinational and sequential hardware structures in processor architectures. A preliminary version of the detection framework was debuted at the prestigious 47th IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), 2014 held in Cambridge, UK.
Dr. Lan receives CISCO grant
Dr. Tian Lan has received a one-year, $150,466 research grant from CISCO. The project is a collaborative effort with Dr. Vaneet Aggarwal (Purdue University). The team will investigate novel use of erasure coding in online distributed storage for improved performance and reliability.
Dr. Subramaniam receives NSF grant for network infrastructure resilience research
Dr. Suresh Subramaniam has received a three-year $368,000 National Science Foundation grant for the project “Resilience in Next-Generation Intelligent Optical Networks.” The world’s telecom infrastructure is dominated by fiber optics because of optical fiber’s tremendous bandwidth, and huge investments continue to be made in that infrastructure. However, as the insatiable demand for bandwidth grows, the network becomes more and more complex and harder to manage and protect. Network designers are, therefore, increasingly turning toward “disaggregated” optical nodes, which are composed of simple building blocks of essential functions. This project aims to equip the network infrastructure with resilience against failures, both small-scale, due to component or system degradation, and large-scale, due to disasters, for example. Resilience schemes at multiple granularity levels, ranging from component-level to network-level to service-level, will be developed. This research is a joint project between Dr. Subramaniam and collaborators from Nagoya University and Kagawa University in Japan, who will be funded separately by NICT, Japan's research and funding agency for telecom research.
Dr. Subramaniam and colleagues receive $496K NSF grant
Dr. Suresh Subramaniam and his collaborator at San Jose State University have received a three-year, $496,000 National Science Foundation grant titled “Design and Provisioning for Inter-Datacenter Multi-granular Flexible Optical Networks.” GW's share of the award is $300,000. Large-scale data centers are constantly evolving to meet the ever-increasing demand for cloud computing services. As the scale of the data continues to increase and latencies become more and more important, providers are turning to geo-distributed datacenters to serve customers at the most proximal datacenter location. These new requirements pose a serious challenge to network operators, who have to come up with a flexible and reliable solution while considering the operational benefits that can potentially result. Recent advances in agile and flexible optical networking have made Flexible Optical Networks (FONs) a promising candidate for meeting the dynamic and heterogeneous connection demands between datacenters. Nevertheless, as networks scale in capacity, fine-grained switching of slots becomes prohibitively expensive; a flexible wavebanding optical cross-connect (OXC) has been recently proposed to offset the large increase in cost. The goal of this project is to develop design and provisioning strategies for multi-granular inter-datacenter FONs. The results of the project will inform the design of agile and flexible optical networks for inter-datacenter networking.
Dr. Venkataramani to serve as associate editor for the Journal of Hardware and Systems Security
Dr. Guru Venkataramani has been invited to serve as an associate editor on the editorial board of the Springer Journal of Hardware and Systems Security.
The journal covers the rapidly growing field of electronic hardware and systems security and highlights new and ground-breaking developments in this field, including cyber-physical systems, IoT, side channels, and hardware trojans. Currently, this is the only journal exclusively dedicated to hardware security.
Dr. Venkataramani chairs NSF Workshop on Side and Covert Channels in Computing Systems hosted at GW
Dr. Guru Venkataramani and his colleague, Dr. Patrick Schaumont (University of Vermont), served as chairs of the March 22-23 National Science Foundation (NSF) Workshop on Side and Covert Channels in Computing Systems.
The workshop was hosted by GW at the Marvin Center, and it created a unique forum to study the threat of side-channel and covert-channel leakage in computing, with the participation of different communities: computer architects, systems researchers,
and hardware designers. Participants identified potential challenges in existing computer design methodologies and discussed the strategies to minimize information leakage. The workshop also featured keynote talks by Dr. Yan Solihin
(North Carolina State University) and meltdown/spectre authors, Dr. Dan Genkin (University of Pennsylvania) and Dr. Yuval Yarom (University of Adelaide).
A comprehensive workshop report will be produced shortly, summarizing the findings and discussion on the current state-of-the-art and projections in terms of detecting, mitigating, and defending against side and covert channels.
