Reminder that Mothy Roscoe and Ihsan Qazi will be giving talks tomorrow. Please sign up to meet with them! Thursday, CSE 305, 11am Mothy Roscoe, ETH Zurich Enzian: Research Computer https://reserve.cs.washington.edu/visitor/week.php?year= 2018&month=4&day=8&area=5&room=3080 Thursday, CSE 305, 12pm Ihsan Qazi, LUMS Understanding Internet Access in the Developing World https://reserve.cs.washington.edu/visitor/week.php?year=2018 &month=04&day=12&area=5&room=3113 ------ Enzian: Research Computer Academic research in rack-scale and datacenter computing today is hamstrung by lack of hardware. Cloud providers and hardware vendors build custom accelerators, interconnects, and networks for commercially important workloads, but university researchers are stuck with commodity, off-the-shelf parts. Enzian is a research computer developed at ETH Zurich in collaboration with Cavium and Xilinx which addresses this problem. An Enzian board consists of a server-class ARMv8 SoC tightly coupled and coherent with a large FPGA (eliminating PCIe), with about 0.5 TB DDR4 and about 600 Gb/s of network I/O either to the CPU (over Ethernet) or directly to the FPGA (potentially over custom protocols). Enzian runs both Barrelfish and Linux operating systems. Many Enzian boards can be connected in a rack-scale machine (either with or without a discrete switch), and the design is intended to allow many different research use-cases: zero-overhead run-time verification of software invariants, novel interconnect protocols for remote memory access, hardware enforcement of access control in a large machine, high-performance streaming analytics using a combination of software and configurable hardware, and much more. By providing a powerful and flexible platform for computer systems research, Enzian aims to enable more relevant and far-reaching work on future compute platforms. Understanding Internet Access in the Developing World In this talk, I will present my recent research on Internet access in developing countries. In the first half of my talk, I will present a study on the characteristics of mobile devices in developing regions. Using a dataset of 0.5 million subscribers from one of the largest cellular operators in Pakistan, I will present an analysis of cell phones being used based on different features (e.g., CPU, memory, and cellular interface). Our analysis reveals potential device-level bottlenecks for Internet access, which can inform infrastructure design for improving mobile web performance. (This work appeared in ACM IMC 2016) Another accessibility challenge in developing countries is the rise in Internet censorship events, which can have a substantial impact on various stakeholders in the Internet ecosystem (e.g., users, content providers, ISPs, and advertisers). In the second half of my talk, I will discuss how Internet censorship poses an economic threat to online advertising, which plays an essential role in enabling the free Web by allowing publishers to monetize their services. Then I will describe a system we designed that enables relevant ads while retaining the effectiveness of censorship resistance tools (e.g., Tor). (This work appeared in ACM HotNets 2017)