Projects

The projects on this page all either use Enzian as a platform or investigate areas that were brought to our attention when building the platform.

Memory Channel Controller

Far, disaggregated memory is transforming data centers, but it comes with performance overheads. The old idea of near-data processing (NDP) gets renewed to address this challenge. While hardware vendors are rushing to design NDP hardware, a critical piece of the puzzle is missing: the operating system abstraction. We propose Memory Channel Controllers – a modern take on mainframe I/O channels – to make NDP portable, virtualizable, and capable of fine-grained cooperation with the host CPU.

Trustworthy Board Management Controllers

Like any other modern server, Enzian has a Board Management Controller (BMC). We are conducting research into making these systems more trustworthy. Our research follows two main avenues:

• Produce trustworthy BMC components by modeling the aspects of the hardware platform they manage.
• Harden the system to keep these components isolated from less trusted components.