Contact

CSE 570
206-543-9204
levycs.washington.edu
Areas of interest: Operating systems design, distributed systems and the Web, security and privacy, computer architecture

Sapphire: Simplifying Mobile/Cloud Applications

Sapphire is a general-purpose distributed programming platform that greatly simplifies the design and implementation of applications spanning mobile devices and clouds. Sapphire removes much of the complexity of managing a wide-area, multi-platform environment, yet still provides developers with the fine-grained control needed to meet critical application needs. Faculty: Krishnamurthy and Levy.

OS structures for NVRAM

In the future, new non-volatile memory technologies, such as phase-change memories and memristors, could change the assumptions underlying the design of current operating systems. We are examining the implications of new, fast non-volatile storage systems on OS mechanisms, functions, and properties, as described in our HotOS paper. Faculty: Ceze and Levy.

Distributed storage systems

We are pushing the limits of today’s distributed storage systems on several fronts. Scatter, a scalable peer-to-peer key-value storage system, preserves serializable consistency even under adverse conditions. Comet is a distributed key-value store that lets clients inject snippets of code into storage elements, creating an active key-value store that greatly increases the power and range of applications that use distributed storage applications. Faculty: Anderson, Kohno, Krishnamurthy, Levy.

File systems for mobile devices

Mobile devices are easily lost or stolen, compromising data and privacy.  We have designed a new file system for mobile devices, called Keypad, which provides an audit trail that indicates which files were (or were not) accessed following device loss and lets users disable file reading post-loss, even in the absence of network connectivity. A Keypad paper was presented at the EuroSys Conference, April 2011 and won the Best Student Paper Award. Faculty: Gribble, Kohno, Levy.

Modern browser and Web systems

The Web has evolved far beyond its original role as a hypertext document delivery system. Today's Web browser increasingly resembles an operating system, in that it executes rich, interactive programs that communicate with cloud-based services.