Achieving 100Gbps intrusion prevention on a single server

November 16, 2020November 14, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Achieving 100 Gbps intrusion prevention on a single server, Zhao et al., OSDI'20 Papers-we-love is hosting a mini-event this Wednesday (18th) where I’ll be leading a panel discussion including one of the authors of today’s paper choice: Justine Sherry. Please do join us if you can. We always want more! This stems from a combination ... Continue Reading

An empirical guide to the behavior and use of scalable persistent memory

March 18, 2020May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

An empirical guide to the behavior and use of scalable persistent memory, Yang et al., FAST'20 We've looked at multiple papers exploring non-volatile main memory and its implications (e.g. most recently 'Efficient lock-free durable sets'). One thing they all had in common is an evaluation using some kind of simulation of the expected behaviour of ... Continue Reading

A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM

December 9, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM Bittman et al., PLOS'19 At the start of November I was privileged to attend HPTS (the High Performance Transaction Systems) conference in Asilomar. If you ever get the chance to go, I highly recommend it. It’s a comparatively small gathering with a great mix of people, and fabulous ... Continue Reading

Efficient lock-free durable sets

December 2, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments

Efficient lock-free durable sets Zuriel et al., OOPSLA'19 Given non-volatile memory (NVRAM), the naive hope for persistence is that it would be a no-op: what happens in memory, stays in memory. Unfortunately, a very similar set of issues to those concerned with flushing volatile memory to persistent disk exist here too, just at another level. ... Continue Reading

Boosted race trees for low energy classification

May 29, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Boosted race trees for low energy classification Tzimpragos et al., ASPLOS'19 We don’t talk about energy as often as we probably should on this blog, but it’s certainly true that our data centres and various IT systems consume an awful lot of it. So it’s interesting to see a paper using nano-Joules per prediction as ... Continue Reading

Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy

May 24, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 14 Comments

Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy Tsai & Sanchez, ASPLOS'19 Last time out we saw how Google have been able to save millions of dollars though memory compression enabled via zswap. One of the important attributes of their design was easy and rapid deployment across an existing fleet. Today’s paper introduces ... Continue Reading

Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers

September 3, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 16 Comments

Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers Scaife et al., USENIX Security 2018 Until I can get my hands on a Skim Reaper I’m not sure I’ll ever trust an ATM or other exposed card reading device (e.g., at garages) again! Scaife et al. conduct a study of skimming devices found by ... Continue Reading

Bounding data races in space and time – part II

August 10, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Bounding data races in space and time Dolan et al., PLDI'18 Yesterday we looked at the case for memory models supporting local data-race-freedom (local DRF). In today’s post we’ll push deeper into the paper and look at a memory model which does just that. Consider a memory store $latex S$ which maps locations to values. ... Continue Reading

Bounding data races in space and time – part I

August 9, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Bounding data races in space and time Dolan et al., PLDI'18 Are you happy with your programming language’s memory model? In this beautifully written paper, Dolan et al. point out some of the unexpected behaviours that can arise in mainstream memory models (C++, Java) and why we might want to strive for something better. Then ... Continue Reading

Grand Pwning Unit: Accelerating microarchitectural attacks with the GPU

July 4, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Grand Pwning Unit: Accelerating microarchitectural attacks with the GPU Frigo et al., IEEE Security & Privacy The general awareness of microarchitectural attacks is greatly increased since meltdown and spectre earlier this year. A lot of time and energy has been spent in defending against such attacks, with a threat model that assumes attacks originate from ... Continue Reading

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