CS Colloquium - Lin Zhong, Rice University

Event time: 
Tuesday, October 2, 2018 - 10:30am
Location: 
AKW 200 See map
51 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

CS Colloquium

Speaker: Prof. Lin Zhong, Rice University

Title: Stop using Linux/C

Hosts: Zhong Shao and Richard Yang

Abstract:

In the past seven years, we have prototyped three generations many-antenna base stations for massive MIMO, a key technology for 5G mobile data network. This experience revealed a critical computational barrier to innovations in wireless networking: Linux/C. The prevalence of C, an unsafe language, in systems software has led to inefficient and undependable software systems that rely on ever more complex hardware for isolation at runtime. In view of this and recent hardware incidents like Spectre and Meltdown, we argue that the hardware and software boundary defined half a century ago is up for a major rethinking. Specifically we show that advancement in systems programming languages and formal methods can be leveraged to minimize runtime, hardware-based isolation, leading to much more efficient and available software systems that can revolutionize telecom infrastructures and IoT devices alike.

Bio:

Lin Zhong is Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering with Rice University. He received his B.S and M.S. from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been with Rice University since September 2005. At Rice, he leads the Efficient Computing Group to make computing, communication, and interfacing more efficient and effective. He and his students received the best paper awards from ACM MobileHCI, IEEE PerCom, and ACM MobiSys (3), and ACM ASPLOS. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Duncan Award from Rice University, and the RockStar Award from ACM SIGMOBILE. More information about his research can be found at http://www.recg.org.