Computer Science and Engineering Department

Simulation is a coinductive proof technique to assert the behavioral equivalence of computing systems that has seen fruitful application in distributed systems, concurrent process calculi, and programming languages, since the 1970’s. We have also utilized simulation in our prior work, where we formalized and proved a folklore claim that the state-based and operation-based approaches to […]

Hardware design flows have become increasingly complex as modern chips integrate billions of transistors and rely on aggressive synthesis optimizations to meet performance, area, and power targets. While these transformations improve circuit efficiency, they also erase the correspondence between gate-level netlists and their originating HDL source lines. The loss of traceability makes post-synthesis debugging, timing […]

Modern applications, such as data center workloads, have become increasingly complex. These applications primarily operate on massive datasets, which involve large memory footprints, irregular access patterns, and complex control and data flows. The processor-memory speed gap, combined with these complexities, can lead to unexpected performance inefficiencies in these applications, preventing them from achieving optimal performance. […]

   Transient execution attacks are serious security threats in modern-day processors. Out-of-order execution compels the processor to access data that should not be otherwise perceived. Leakage of that secret information creates a covert channel for the attacker for various types of transient and speculative attacks. Transient based execution attacks emanate when the secret information is leaked […]