by Simha Sethumadhavan on May 31, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, Hardware, Policy, Security
What should governments do when they discover a hardware 0-day? In the US, as a matter of policy, any vulnerability that is deemed to affect critical infrastructure is disclosed to the vendors by the government [VEP]. The government can hide vulnerabilities (and...
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by Simha Sethumadhavan on May 25, 2017 | Tags: Architecture, Hardware, Policy, Security
[Editor’s Note: This post is the first in a series of micro-blogs over four consecutive days.] 0-day security exploits are attacks that use vulnerabilities that are unknown to a vendor. They are referred to as 0-days because the vendor knows about them for zero...
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by Abhishek Bhattacharjee on May 22, 2017 | Tags: Systems, Virtual Memory
As computer architects, one of our key tasks is to propose abstractions that improve system programmability in a manner that stands the test of time. One such abstraction, that has been crucial to the success of computing, is the concept of virtual memory. In this...
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by Mark Silberstein on May 18, 2017 | Tags: Accelerators, Databases, Networking, Programmability, Specialization
In this blogpost I share what I learned at the Seventh Workshop on Multi-core and Rack-scale Systems (MaRS) co-located with the EuroSYS Conference on Computer Systems held in Belgrade in April. It is a small but vigorous interdisciplinary workshop that focuses on the...
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by Reetuparna Das on May 8, 2017 | Tags: Accelerators, Cache, Memory, Near Data Computing, Specialization
Computer designers have traditionally separated the role of storage and computation. Memories stored data. Processors computed them. Is this distinction necessary? A human brain doesn’t separate the two so distinctly, so why should a computer? Before I address this...
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