Research

The potential for multicore computing on a chip has gained new traction with the work by MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department faculty member Li-Shiuan Peh and EECS graduate student Bhavya Daya as they present a new 36-core chip on which each core acts as a mini Internet using a router to complete a communication network for data transport, while keeping local data up to date. Read more.

Today, March 12, 2014, marks the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for managing general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research based in Geneva where Berners-Lee worked at the time as a software engineer. He proposed building a distributed (global) hypertext system which he initially called "Mesh" updating it a year later to the "World Wide Web" as he wrote the code. Read more.

MIT EECS faculty members in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab CSAIL Frans Kaashoek, Nickolai Zeldovich and Armando Solar-Lezama along with EECS graduate student Xi Wang have created a system they call Stack which will automatically scan programmer's code to avoid compilers from tossing bits of code that might not appear essential. Read more.

Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and members of the Computational Structures Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have developed a new system that not only disguises a server's memory-access patterns, but also prevents attacks that rely on how long computations take.

Researchers working with EECS faculty member and CSAIL principal investigator Samuel Madden, are developing a new system called DBSeer to address the realities of cloud computing -- particularly database applications requiring over expenditure for hardware. In June, Professor Madden and members of the MIT Database Group including first author of two papers on this work, postdoctoral associate Barzan Mozafari will present their work at the annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD).

Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston, who earned his undergraduate degree in computer science at MIT in 2005 and teamed with then EECS undergraduate student Arash Ferdowsi to found the company, will be the MIT June 7, 2013 Commencement speaker. "I’ve had some of the most formative experiences of my life at MIT,” Houston says. “It’s where Dropbox started and where I met my co-founder, Arash, so it’s an honor to come back and share my story. Technology is at the heart of how we shape our future and confront our challenges, and more than ever the world needs MIT graduates to lead us forward.”

Professor Srini Devadas has been selected as an Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, joining Prof. Alan Willsky as the second Edwin Sibley Webster chaired professor at MIT. Professor Devadas succeeds nearly sixty years of many prominent faculty members holding this professorship, including Ernst Guillemin in 1960, Lan Jen Chu in 1963, Peter Elias in 1974, and Ronald Rivest in 1992.

Testing unbuilt chips A new software-simulation system promises much more accurate evaluation of promising — but potentially fault-ridden — multicore-chip designs.