Your Abstractions are Worth^H^H^H^H^HPowerless!

Опубликовано 12 августа 2016, 0:10

Did you hear the one about how many batteries it takes to turn on a Turing machine? None! It's outside the model of computation. Yet it's extremely difficult to compute without power. Perpetual computing is hard. This talk will describe recent results on software techniques for low-voltage probabilistic storage on microcontrollers with NOR flash memory ('Half-Wits' at USENIX FAST) and energy-aware checkpointing on transiently powered, embedded computers ('Mementos' at ACM ASPLOS). Although embedded systems continue to shrink in size and power consumption, batteries have become larger and heavier than the computer itself. So get rid of the battery. A computational RFID subsists on eight orders of magnitude less energy than a typical AA battery. This lack of energy leads to two research challenges: how to reliably store data in non-volatile memory at low cost and low voltage, and how to cope with the frequent and complete loss of volatile memory on transiently powered computers. The Half-Wits work analyzes the stochastic behavior of writing to embedded flash memory at voltages lower than recommended by a microcontroller's specifications to reduce energy consumption. Our software-only coding algorithms enable reliable storage at low voltages on unmodified hardware by exploiting the electrically cumulative nature of half-written data in write-once bits (half-wits). Measurements show that our software approach reduces energy consumption by up to 50 Kevin Fu is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and adjunct Associate Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prof. Fu makes embedded computer systems smarter: better security and safety, reduced energy consumption, faster performance. His most recent contributions on trustworthy medical devices and computational RFIDs appear in computer science and medical conferences and journals. The research is featured in critical articles by the NYT, WSJ, and NPR. Prof. Fu served as a visiting scientist at the Food & Drug Administration, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of Harvard Medical School, and MIT CSAIL. He is a member of the NIST Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. Prof. Fu received a Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER award, and best paper awards from various academic silos of computing. He was named MIT Technology Review TR35 Innovator of the Year. Prof. Fu received his Ph.D. in EECS from MIT when his research pertained to secure storage and web authentication. He also holds a certificate of achievement in artisanal bread making from the French Culinary Institute. He has a doppelganger who works on medical device cybersecurity.