Performance, Applications, and Security Lab (PAS)

Shih-Hao Hung, Assistant Professor
Dept. of Computer Science & Information Engineering (CSIE)
National Taiwan University

In the PAS Lab, we are interested in exploring the interactions between the following three important aspects of computer systems: Performance, Applications, and Security.

We see three key issues that have fundamentally driven the evolution of the computer industry to where it is today:  Performance, Applications, and Security, and we believe that they are keys to building better computer systems for tomorrow. Why are we putting them together in one sentence? Because many practical computing problems require us to consider more than one issue in order to obtain optimal solutions. For example, people are talking about hardware-software co-design these days. In our experience, solving such kind of problems is usually highly challenging, as it often requires the understanding of the big picture of the problem and in-depth knowledge of many state-of-the-art technologies.

To make a computer better, we need to improve its performance, applications, and security with hardware and software the technologies. The key technologies may vary as new technologies are invented while old technologies become obsolete. Amazingly, the advance of hardware technologies allows our latest computers to perform just well enough to keep up with complex applications and meet Todayˇ¦s security requirement. But, what if the computer industry runs out of hardware tricks to make CPUˇ¦s run twice as fast in 18 months? How about buying the latest 8-CPU systems before you figure out your applications have to be re-written to scale beyond 2 CPUˇ¦s? When 10 gigabit Ethernet shows up, can our computers take advantage of the abundant bandwidth? Do you trust software vendors to provide us with killer applications that run smoothly and securely over the Internet? How would you design a system on a chip to run specific applications, when performance and low-power are critical?

Before establishing this Lab in 2005, I personally spent my last 12 years dealing with performance and applications. At the University of Michigan, we optimized parallel applications on supercomputers by writing assembly codes. We developed performance tools so that we were able to understand the applications and the platform better than anybody, even their makers. At Sun Microsystems, our group competes with IBM and HP by producing many world-record benchmark results on Big-Iron enterprise servers. When security became a hot topic, I helped Sun design special cryptographic functionality that makes secured applications run 10X faster on Sun systems. Even after I joined NTU, Sun and I collaborate to solve certain hardware-software co-design issues for Sun's next-generation embedded processors.

Security is extremely important for applications in Today's networking environment. Security usually comes at the cost of performance because many security operations consumes enormous amount of computer and network resources. The choice and use of security protocols can impact application performance greatly. For example, the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol widely used in e-commerce would slow down Web transactions by 100X. Therefore, we study how security protocols are performed in applications and the software and hardware technologies to accelerate security operations.

(This page is still under construction).