NEWS

Prof. James Tuck and Prof. Yan Solihin have been awarded a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study the use of helper computing to improve security and reliability in multicore processors.

As software complexity increases and threats from security attacks grow, a new low-overhead approach for improving software reliability and security is urgently needed. In helper computing, relatively autonomous "helper" threads or processes execute extra code on behalf of the application on separate processor cores or thread contexts. In the past, the use of helper threads was constrained to prefetching and branch prediction.  Only recently has helper computing been exploited for performing metafunctions, such as memory management and bug detection.