Our mission is fostering the creation and development of high-performance, reliable and secure computing systems that are easy to interact with.
We conduct research in the areas of hardware synthesis, computer security, computer architecture and VLSI design. We are interested in the scaling of databases and data management systems to 1000-core processors, concurrency control for databases, synthesis and verification of large digital systems described using Guarded Atomic Action, and Memory Models and Cache Coherence Protocols for parallel architectures and languages. Recently, our group pointed out vulnerabilities in anonymizing networks, and designed Riffle, a system with strong anonymity.
This project focuses on altering the way trusted execution environments handle paging to decouple page access patterns from the control flow of the program, preventing an attacker from using these access patterns to learn information about program secrets.
(This project is no longer active.) The T-1000, a prototype system of a thousand realistic processors embedded throughout an ensemble of interconnected FPGAs, seeks to demonstrate the scalability of timestamp-based cache coherence protocols on distributed shared memory systems.
Uhura is an autonomous system that collaborates with humans in planning and executing complex tasks, especially under over-subscribed and risky situations.
Our research aims to scale hard-to-parallelize applications through new programming models and multicore architectures. Our goal is to enable
programmers to write efficient and scalable parallel programs as easily as they
write sequential programs today.
BlueDBM is an architecture of computer clusters consisting of fast distributed flash storage and in-storage accelerators, which often outperforms larger and more expensive clusters in applications such as graph analytics.
Computer scientist who specializes in database management systems joins the leadership of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
In controlled experiments, MIT CSAIL researchers discover simulations of reality developing deep within LLMs, indicating an understanding of language beyond simple mimicry.
ACM SIGPLAN recently honored Armando Solar Lezama, MIT EECS professor and CSAIL Associate Director and Chief Operating Officer for his impactful work in program synthesis.
Sam Madden ’99, MNG ’99, MIT professor, CSAIL member, and Cambridge Mobile Telematics co-founder, received the Codd Innovations Award from ACM SIGMOD for his research contributions to data management.
Anyone who’s downloaded an update to a computer program or phone app knows that most commercial software has bugs and security holes that require regular “patching.” Often, those bugs are simple oversights. For example, the program tries to read data that have already been deleted. The patches, too, are often simple — such as a single line of code that verifies that a data object still exists.
Most modern websites store data in databases, and since database queries are relatively slow, most sites also maintain so-called cache servers, which list the results of common queries for faster access. A data center for a major web service such as Google or Facebook might have as many as 1,000 servers dedicated just to caching.
