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Research Statement

The institute of parallel and distributed systems (IPADS) conducts research in all aspects of computer systems, with a primary focus on operating systems, distributed systems, database systems, system virtualization, programming model and runtime for multicore systems. Our research also involves other disciplines such as computer architecture, languages and compilers. The research themes of IPADS are improving the performance scalability, energy efficiency and dependability of centralized and distributed computer systems.

We have built a number of systems to address the scalability and dependability issues of computer systems. Examples include a trusted cloud platform that addresses the trustworthiness of multi-tenant cloud (CloudVisor), a reader-writer lock that provides scalable read-side performance and small writer latency (Prwlock), a portable parallel full-system emulator for several hundreds of cores (COREMU), fast graph query and processing frameworks (Wukong and PowerLyra), an in-memory transaction processing framework supported by hardware features such as HTM, RDMA and NVM (DrTM), and a dependable and hardened hypervisor with small TCB (Nexen).

Our current research focus is in providing system support for large-scale computing systems, scaling existing software stack to future computing platforms with ultra-low latency, high-bandwidth networking and non-volatile memory, and providing hardware and software solutions to dependable computing environments in both mobile and cloud platforms.

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