Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Here’s a short list of posters from the ASPLOS ’08 combined opening reception and poster session that I found particularly interesting.

“MemCrawler: Discovering Structures in Memory” – Given a dump of physical memory, a list of interesting patterns and a list of object constraints, MemCrawler will identify kernel data structures and functions in the dump.

“Coevolution of Operating Systems and Asymmetric Single-ISA CMPs” – Not all cores and pieces of code are created equal – is it feasible to run specific pieces of operating system code (e.g., the TCP/IP stack) on smaller and less complex cores? Our ASPLOS paper explores a similar question.

“Multi-host I/O sharing by using I/O virtualization technology, ExpEther” – Extending the PCI-e bus through 10Gb ethernet. A host talks PCI-e to an FPGA which encapsulates PCI-e messages over ethernet and transmits them to a remote FPGA which decapsulates the PCI-e messages and passes them to a PCI-e endpoint. We explored similar issues with the IPOnly server. Being able to “remote” a device without needing a host (general purpose CPU) to be connected to it is pretty neat.

“Efficient Fault Tolerance in Multi-media Applications through Selective Instruction Replication” – Not all instructions are created equal. Some matter to successful completion of the program, some don’t. In media applications, Control flow is important, but manipulations on individual pixels less so. No point in replaying or replicating instructions which don’t matter.