arXiv subjects

Shuang Zhai

Publications and source records attributed to Shuang Zhai.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Rewrite it in Rust: A Computational Physics Case Study

Surveys of computational science show that many scientists use languages like C and C++ in order to write code for scientific computing, especially in scenarios where performance is a key factor. In this paper, we seek to evaluate the use of Rust in such a scenario, through implementations of a physics simulation in both C++ and Rust. We also create a parallel version of our Rust code, in order to further explore performance as well as parallel code complexity. Measuring performance as program runtime, we find that Rust can offer better performance than C++, with some test cases showing as much as a 5.6$\times$ performance increase, and that parallel code in Rust can further improve performance while being easy to write safely. Finally, we provide some preliminary profiling to better understand the difference between the way our implementations perform.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2019

StreamBox-TZ: Secure Stream Analytics at the Edge with TrustZone

While it is compelling to process large streams of IoT data on the cloud edge, doing so exposes the data to a sophisticated, vulnerable software stack on the edge and hence security threats. To this end, we advocate isolating the data and its computations in a trusted execution environment (TEE) on the edge, shielding them from the remaining edge software stack which we deem untrusted. This approach faces two major challenges: (1) executing high-throughput, low-delay stream analytics in a single TEE, which is constrained by a low trusted computing base (TCB) and limited physical memory; (2) verifying execution of stream analytics as the execution involves untrusted software components on the edge. In response, we present StreamBox-TZ (SBT), a stream analytics engine for an edge platform that offers strong data security, verifiable results, and good performance. SBT contributes a data plane designed and optimized for a TEE based on ARM TrustZone. It supports continuous remote attestation for analytics correctness and result freshness while incurring low overhead. SBT only adds 42.5 KB executable to the TCB (16% of the entire TCB). On an octa core ARMv8 platform, it delivers the state-of-the-art performance by processing input events up to 140 MB/sec (12M events/sec) with sub-second delay. The overhead incurred by SBT's security mechanism is less than 25%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Transkernel: Bridging Monolithic Kernels to Peripheral Cores

Smart devices see a large number of ephemeral tasks driven by background activities. In order to execute such a task, the OS kernel wakes up the platform beforehand and puts it back to sleep afterwards. In doing so, the kernel operates various IO devices and orchestrates their power state transitions. Such kernel executions are inefficient as they mismatch typical CPU hardware. They are better off running on a low-power, microcontroller-like core, i.e., peripheral core, relieving CPU from the inefficiency. We therefore present a new OS structure, in which a lightweight virtual executor called transkernel offloads specific phases from a monolithic kernel. The transkernel translates stateful kernel execution through cross-ISA, dynamic binary translation (DBT); it emulates a small set of stateless kernel services behind a narrow, stable binary interface; it specializes for hot paths; it exploits ISA similarities for lowering DBT cost. Through an ARM-based prototype, we demonstrate transkernel's feasibility and benefit. We show that while cross-ISA DBT is typically used under the assumption of efficiency loss, it can enable efficiency gain, even on off-the-shelf hardware.

cs.OS↗