Research Statement

Due to historical reasons, today’s computer systems treat I/O devices as second-class citizens, sup-porting them with ad hoc and poorly-developed system software. As I/O devices are getting more diverse and are taking a central role in modern systems from mobile systems to servers, such second-class system support challenges system reliability and security and hinders novel system services such as remote access and virtualization. My research goal is to tackle these challenges by rethinking the system support for I/O devices. For years, research for I/O devices is limited largely to network and storage devices. However, a diverse set of I/O devices are increasingly important for emerging computing paradigms. For modern mobile systems from smartphones to wearables, I/O devices such as sensors and actuators are essential to the user experience. Moving forward, the Internet of Things and smart environments will provide even greater I/O capability to mobile computing services. At the same time, high-performance computers in data centers are embracing hardware specialization, or accelerators, such as GPU, DSP, crypto accelerator, etc., to improve the system performance and efficiency as the Dennard scaling has ended. Modern systems also treat such specialized hardware as I/O devices. These emerging I/O devices are the focus of my research