ITI Research Theme: Embedded and Enterprise Computing
Wen-mei Hwu, Theme Leader
Overview
Embedded computing and enterprise computing are two application domains that affect the quality of life for billions of people. The well-being of our daily life hinges on reliable, secure operation of our telecommunication infrastructure, power grid infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, and medical equipment, all of which are built upon embedded computing platforms. The operations of our government, businesses, and households rely on the information retrieval, transaction processing, and data mining applications that are built on enterprise computing platforms. The trustworthiness of both embedded and enterprise computing platforms will be a fundamental issue affecting both the stability and the potential growth of the international economy, as well as the quality of individual lives.
Embedded computing and enterprise computing platforms have traditionally been developed separately. As enterprise computing becomes increasingly power-constrained and interactive in nature, the future courses of embedded and enterprise computing are merging. With respect to the particular issue of providing trust, the challenges of the two domains are also converging. Providing trust in enterprise computing is challenging when multiple organizations share a computing infrastructure, a trend that is increasingly important due to economic pressure and technical challenges involved in in-house IT operations. Such a scenario can lead to concerns involving access rights, virus infection, system crashes, and corporate espionage. The same trust challenges exist in embedded computing, but for different reasons. Embedded systems, such as cell phones, are increasingly becoming open systems in which applications from multiple vendors must co-exist to deliver the rich functionalities required by the customers. There is a great opportunity for research and development towards a trustworthy computing platform for both domains.
Research Focus
This embedded and enterprise computing theme addresses the challenge of providing architecture and operating system platforms for trustworthy computing for mission-critical applications. Building on UIUC's long history in advanced computing architectures, reliable computing, and security mechanisms, this theme is developing compiler, operating system, hardware techniques, and assessment tools that together form the fundamental fabric of trustworthy computing. The theme also actively contributes to the design of Trusted ILLIAC, a cluster-based enterprise architecture that incorporates specialized hardware to implement trusted system algorithms efficiently and effectively. Based on a commodity Linux cluster, Trusted ILLIAC uses reconfigurable hardware, smart compilers capable of extracting program components into hardware logic, application-specific reliability and security mechanisms, and a custom middleware to provide trustworthy application execution.