Pin Zhou
OPERA Group, Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
http://opera.cs.uiuc.edu/~pinzhou/
Tuesday, March 21 2006
1065 Kemper Hall
3 :10-4:00 p.m.
Improving Software Dependability with Hardware Support
As software permeates our daily life and becomes increasingly complex, software dependability becomes critically important. The main obstacle to building dependable software is software bugs, which often account for 40% of computer system failures and over 50% of security vulnerabilities. Existing dynamic bug detection techniques suffer from high overhead and can greatly benefit from the recent impressive advances in computer architecture.
In this talk, I will present my thesis work on using general, novel hardware support for detecting software bugs in production runs. First, I will introduce a simple and general hardware framework called iWatcher that enables efficient memory monitoring and can be used to detect a wide variety of bugs with very low overhead, orders of magnitudes smaller than software-only approaches. Next, I will present an innovative bug detection technique called PC-based invariants and an efficient novel hardware implementation of this technique to detect general memory corruptions during production runs. Finally, I will briefly describe my recent work on using the iWatcher hardware support for efficient data structure consistency checks and my future research plan.
BIO: Pin Zhou will complete her Ph.D degree soon in summer 2006 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She holds an M.S. from Tsinghua University, China. Her research interests are hardware and system support for improving software dependability, operating systems, memory management, and storage systems. The work presented in this talk appeared at ISCA, MICRO, IEEE Micro's Top Picks, and ACM TACO. She received the W.J. Poppelbaum Memorial Award in 2004, an honor given to one or two graduate students every year in computer architecture at University of Illinois. Two of her papers were selected in the IEEE Micro Special Issue: Micro's Top Picks from Computer Architecture conferences in 2004. Further information is available at http://opera.cs.uiuc.edu/~pinzhou.