Research

Spring 2020

Time and Location

The lunch seminar is held on Friday from 12:00 to 13:00 on Zoom.

UPDATE: Due to COVID-19 isolation, Lunch Seminar is resumed on Zoom.

Lunch Seminar organizers:

Anastasiia Ruzhanskaia, Monica Chiosa, David Dao and Catalina Alvarez

 

The topic will be announced shortly before the talk.

  

Date Speaker Institute Topic Food
 21.02.2020 Vojislav Dukic ETH Zurich Towards efficient execution of tiny clouds workloads Nora Hollenstein
 28.02.2020 Thomas Preusser ETH Zurich Potpourri of Precious Structures for Computing Cedric Renggli
 06.03.2020 Dimitrios Koutsoukos ETH Zurich Modularis: Modular Data Analytics for Hardware, Software, and Platform Heterogeneity Debopam Bhattacherjee
 03.04.2020 Lukas Burkhalter ETH Zurich

TimeCrypt:Encrypted Data Stream Processing at Scale with Cryptographic Access Control

 -
 10.04.2020  GOOD FRIDAY  -  -  -
 17.04.2020 Zhenhao He ETH Zurich BiS-KM: Enabling Any-Precision K-Means on FPGAs -
 24.04.2020 Mellisa 
Licciardello		 ETH Zurich New directions in video streaming  -
 01.05.2020  LABOR DAY  -  -  -
08.05.2020

Rodrigo Bruno Konstantin Taranov 

ETH Zurich Naos: Avoiding Object Serialization in Java Heaps using RDMA  
15.05.2020 Daniel Schwyn ETH Zurich Declarative Power Management  -
22.05.2020 Maurice Weber ETH Zurich  Provable ML Robustness Guarantees against Semantic Transformations  -
29.05.2020 Ghislain Fourny ETH Zurich  Quantum theory and determinism: Why there really is no contradiction  

 

Alveo FPGA Cluster

Description

The Alveo FPGA Cluster enables access to custom hardware acceleration. Read to the official press release here.

Infrastructure

All servers have XRT 2.5.309 installed.

The build server, alveo0.ethz.ch, provides the following tools and development shells:

The alveo1.ethz.ch U250 server is dedicated for QDMA shell deployment. For more information about it, click here

Server OS Alveo Boards Xilinx Shell VM
alveo1.ethz.ch Ubuntu 18.04.3 U250
U250		 QDMA 201920.1
QDMA 201920.1		 alveo1a.ethz.ch
alveo1b.ethz.ch
alveo2.ethz.ch Ubuntu 18.04.3 U250
U250		 XDMA 201830.2
XDMA 201830.2		 alveo2a.ethz.ch
alveo2b.ethz.ch
alveo3.ethz.ch Ubuntu 18.04.3 U250
U280
U280		 XDMA 201830.2
XDMA 201920.3
XDMA 201920.3		 alveo3a.ethz.ch
alveo3b.ethz.ch
alveo3c.ethz.ch
alveo4.ethz.ch Ubuntu 18.04.3 U250
U280
U280		 XDMA 201830.2
XDMA 201920.3
XDMA 201920.3		 alveo4a.ethz.ch
alveo4b.ethz.ch
alveo4c.ethz.ch

 

Server CPU Frequency # of Cores RAM
alveo0.ethz.ch 2x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6248 2.50 GHz 40 376 GiB
alveo1.ethz.ch 2x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6234 3.30 GHz 16 376 GiB
alveo2.ethz.ch 2x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6234 3.30 GHz 16 376 GiB
alveo3.ethz.ch 4x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6234 3.30 GHz 32 376 GiB
alveo4.ethz.ch 4x Intel® Xeon® Gold 6234 3.30 GHz 32 376 GiB

Booking system

For scheduling accesses to the machines, use the booking system: alveo-booking.ethz.ch

Access to the Cluster

The Alveo Cluster is not accessible directly from the Internet. To access the cluster from outside the ETHZ network, VPN or SSH tunnel must be used. Instructions on how to access the cluster will be sent when Guest Account is created.

Currently, access is through a VM that grants access to a single FPGA. It is possible to reserve VMs that provide access to an entire node with several FPGAs. There is also a VM running InAccel in either single FPGA or multiple FPGA mode (within a single node). We will be adding more options as demand arises.

Registration

To access the cluster, researchers outside ETH should request access through Xilinx University Program. For researchers at ETH, please contact Prof. Gustavo Alonso.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Xilinx® for the board donation.

Spring 2019

Time and Location

The lunch seminar is held every Friday from 12:15 to 13:15 at CAB E 72.

Lunch Seminar organizers:

Merve Gürel, Frances Hubis, Simon Kassing, Fabio Maschi

 

The topic will be announced shortly before the talk.

 

Date Speaker Institute Topic Food
22.02.2019 Mathias Soeken EPFL Building quantum compilers with logic synthesis Moritz Hoffmann
01.03.2019 Dimitris Sarigiannis ETH Zurich Tera-scale Machine Learning on Distributed Heterogenous Platforms Debopam Bhattacherjee
  Monica Chiosa ETH Zurich Systems and FPGAs  
  David Dao ETH Zurich Machine Learning Systems for Social Good  
08.03.2019 Zhenhao He ETH Zurich Virtual Channels: Enabling Applications on Multi-FPGA Platforms Zaheer Chothia
15.03.2019 Michal Wawrzoniak ETH Zurich   Vojislav Dukic
  Susie Xi Rao ETH Zurich    
  Daniel Schwyn ETH Zurich    
22.03.2019 Vojislav Dukic ETH Zurich Short talk Shaoduo Gan
  Satadal Sengupta ETH Zurich / IIT Kharagpur Short introductory talk  
29.03.2019 Alexander Hedges ETH Zurich ECI (Enzian Coherent Interconnect): Theory and Practice Roni Häcki
  Nikita Lazarev ETH Zurich    
05.04.2019 Mattia Gollub, Eline Bijman ETH Zurich iGEM AROMA Reto Achermann
12.04.2019 Cedric Renggli ETH Zurich Comparison Based Optimization Kaan Kara
  Nora Hollenstein ETH Zurich    
19.04.2019 -- GOOD FRIDAY      
26.04.2019 Ghislain Fourny ETH Zurich Querying JSON on Spark: DataFrames without frames Abishek Ramdas
03.05.2019 Andrea Lattuada ETH Zurich Replicator: coordination-free fault-tolerance in streaming Monica Chiosa
10.05.2019 Rodrigo Bruno ETH Zurich Swiss-Scale Multi-Mode Transport Simulation Renato Marroquín
  Bojan Karlaš ETH Zurich Data Processing Pipelines for Automated Feature Engineering  
17.05.2019 Tim Kraska MIT Towards Learned Algorithms, Data Structures, and Systems Johannes Rausch
24.05.2019 Zeke Wang ETH Zurich Memory representations for machine learning on hardware accelerators Dario Korolija
31.05.2019 Jansen Zhao ETH Zurich   Bojan Karlaš

 

Fall 2018


Time and Location

The lunch seminar is held every Friday from 12:15 to 13:15 at CAB E 72.

Lunch Seminar organizers:

Vasiliki Kalavri, Melissa Licciardello, Shaoduo Gan, Sabir Akhadov

 

The topic will be announced shortly before the talk.

 

Date Speaker Institute Topic Food
 21.09.2018  Can Firtina  ETH Zurich  Biologically inspired computing architectures and their integration with the Brain-Computer Interfaces

Andrea Lattuada

(Bagels)
Abishek Ramdas   ETH Zurich  VLSI Testing and Diagnosis
     
 28.09.2018  Frances Hubis  ETH Zurich  Variational Inference for Dynamic Causal Models Reto Achermann
 Yishay Oltchik  ETH Zurich  Network Topologies and Graph Theory
 Giray Yaglikci  ETH Zurich  Latency and Energy Characteristics of DRAMs
 05.10.2018  Alan Mishchenko  UC Berkeley

FPGA Technology Mapping for LUTs, LUT Structures, and Programmable Cells

  David Sidler
 12.10.2018  Alser  Mohammed H. K. ETH Zurich Title 1: Accelerating Genome Analysis

Title 2: Performance modeling and optimization with artificial intelligence methods

 Yishai Oltchik
 Shigang Li
 19.10.2018 Michel Muller  ETH Zurich  Streamlining High Performance Computing  Marcin Copik
 26.10.2018  Müller Ingo  ETH Zurich The Collection Virtual Machine -- An Abstraction for Multi-Frontend Multi-Backend Data Analysis  Lukas Humbel
 02.11.2018

-

 -    
 09.11.2018 Hantian Zhang  ETH Zurich  Towards an updatable learned index Salvatore Di Girolamo
16.11.2018 Moritz Hoffmann  ETH Zurich  Megaphone: Live state migration for distributed streaming dataflows

Alexandros Ziogas
 23.11.2018 Fabio Maschi  ETH Zurich  Memory Study and Optimisation within a Neural Network Hardware Accelerator Tobias Gysi
 30.11.2018 Reto Achermann  ETH Zurich Mitosis – Transparent Self-Replicating Page Tables for Big Memory Machines  Hasan Hassan
 07.12.2018 Muhsen Owaida  ETH Zurich

Inference of Decision Tree Ensembles on Modern FPGA platforms

 Simon Kassing
 14.12.2018

Vojislav Dukic

  ETH Zurich  Happiness index: Right-sizing the cloud’s tenant-provider interface  Nora Hollenstein

 

Computing Platforms Seminar Series (COMPASS)

The Computing Platforms Seminar Series (COMPASS) is focused on talks by industry and academia around the general topic of computing platforms.

COMPASS is held on most Thursdays during the semester 10:00-11:00 (with some exceptions) in CAB E 72.


Upcoming Talks 

Due to the ongoing situation, the COMPASS seminar is cancelled during the Spring Semester 2020. We will resume in Fall 2020.

 

Past COMPASS Talks:  

 

Date Speaker Affiliation Talk
27.02.2020 Alberto Lerner University of Fribourg Rethinking the Interactions between In-Memory Databases and Storage
03.02.2020 Lars Eggert/Industry Panel NetAppZurich QUIC – Will it Replace TCP/IP?
28.11.2019 Djordje Zegarac and Martin Marciniszyn Tensor Technologies High Frequency Trading and FPGAs
21.11.2019 Tamás Hauer Google Zurich Meaningful Availability
17.10.2019 René Müller
NVIDIA Simplifying NVIDIA GPU Access: A Polyglot Binding for GPUs with GraalVM
10.10.2019 Norman May SAP Research Exploiting modern hardware in SAP HANA
26.09.2019 Ben Zhao University of Chicago Hidden Backdoors in Deep Learning Systems
19.09.2019 Martin Hentschel/Max Heimel Snowflake File Metadata Management at Snowflake
11.07.2019 Boris Grot University of Edinburgh Scale-Out ccNUMA: Embracing Skew in Distributed Key-Value Stores
17.05.2019 Tim Kraska MIT Towards Learned Algorithms, Data Structures, and Systems
25.04.2019 Peter Pietzuch Imperial College London Scaling Deep Learning on Multi-GPU Servers
28.03.2019 Theo Rekatsinas
University of Wisconsin A Machine Learning Perspective on Managing Noisy Data
21.03.2019 Marko Vukolic IBM Research Hyperledger Fabric: a Distributed Operating System for Permissioned Blockchains
28.02.2019 Alberto Lerner University of Fribourg
 The Case for Network-Accelerated Query Processing
21.02.2019 Thomas Würthinger Oracle Labs Bringing the Code to the Data with GraalVM
31.01.2019 Irene Zhang Microsoft Research, Redmond Demikernel: An Operating System Architecture for Hardware-Accelerated Datacenter Servers
25.10.2018 Mihnea Andrei SAP HANA Snapshot isolation in HANA - the evolution towards production-grade HTAP
04.10.2018 Philippe Bonnet IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark Near-Data Processing with Open-Channel SSDs
25.09.2018 Nandita Vijaykumar   Carnegie Mellon University Expressive Memory: Rethinking the Hardware-Software Contract with Rich Cross-Layer Abstractions
20.09.2018 Patrick Stüdi IBM Research Data processing at the speed of 100 Gbps using Apache Crail (Incubating)
15.08.2018 Leonid Yavits
Technion Resistive CAM based architectures: Resistive Associative In-Storage Processor and Resistive Address Decoder
06.07.2018 Martin Burtscher Texas State University Automatic Hierarchical Parallelization of Linear Recurrences
15.06.2018 Nitin Agrawal Samsung Research Low-Latency Analytics on Colossal Data Streams with SummaryStore
24.05.2018 Cagri Balkesen Oracle Labs RAPID: In-Memory Analytical Query Processing Engine with Extreme Performance per Watt
16.05.2018 Carsten Binnig TU Darmstadt Towards Interactive Data Exploration
09.05.2018 Bastian Hossbach Oracle Labs Modern programming languages and code generation in the Oracle Database
26.04.2018 Spyros Blanas Ohio State University Scaling database systems to high-performance computers
19.04.2018 Jane Hung MIT The Challenges and Promises of Large-Scale Biological Imaging
12.04.2018 Christoph Hagleitner IBM Research Heterogeneous Computing Systems for Datacenter and HPC Applications
14.03.2018  Eric Sedlar
  Oracle Labs
 Why Systems Research Needs Social Science Added to the Computer Science
01.03.2018 Saughata Ghose Carnegie Mellon University How Safe Is Your Storage? A Look at the Reliability and Vulnerability of Modern Solid-State Drives
22.02.2018  Ioannis Koltsidas IBM Research Zurich System software for commodity solid-state storage

 


 

 

Spring 2017


Time and Location

The lunch seminar is held every Friday from 12:15 to 13:15h at CAB E 72 (lunch provided at 12:00).

Lunch Seminar organizers:

Renato Marroquin, Lukas Humbel, Konstantin Taranov, Debopam Bhattacherjee

 

The topic will be announced shortly before the talk.

Date Speaker Institute Topic Food
24.02.2017 Markus Pilman Snowflake Computing Snowflake - A Data Warehouse built for the Cloud

Ingo Muller

(Bagels)
03.03.2017 Vasiliki Kalavri Systems Group Introduction to Apache Flink

Reto Achermann

(Pizza)
10.03.2017 Tal Ben Nun Systems Group Memory Access Patterns: The Missing Piece of the GPU Programming Puzzle

Claude Barthels

(Nordsee)
17.03.2017 Hasan Hasan Systems Group  DRAM Latency Reduction

 Darko Makreshanski

(Grune Lebanon)
24.03.2017

Satoshi Matsuoka

12:15pm

 Tokyo Institute of Technology FLOPS to BYTES: Accelerating Beyond Moore's Law Roni Häcki 

Aya Fukami

1:00 pm

 Carnegie Mellon University

Improving the Reliability of Chip-Off Forensic Analysis of NAND Flash Memory Devices

  
31.03.2017 Petar Tsankov Information Security Group Programmable Networks with Synthesis Kaan Kara
07.04.2017 Aanjhan Ranganathan System Security Group Securing Next-generation Autonomous Cyber-physical Systems Moritz Hoffmann 
14.04.2017 Good Friday Holiday    
21.04.2017 Darko Makreshanski Systems Group BatchDB: Efficient Isolated Execution of Hybrid OLTP+OLAP Workloads for Interactive Applications Gerd Zellweger
28.04.2017 Debopam Bhattacherjee Systems Group A Cloud-based Content Gathering Network Maciej Besta
05.05.2017 Dimitar Dimitrov Software Reliability Lab Serializability for Eventual Consistency: Criterion, Analysis, and Applications (POPL 2017) Salvatore Di Girolamo
12.05.2017 Alexandr Nigay Systems Group Exploring the idea of virtualizing MPI Sebastian Wicki
19.05.2017 Vojslav Dukic Systems Group Datacenter oracle: Predicting Resource Usage Inside a Data Center  Yaohua Wang
26.05.2017 Salvatore Di Girolamo Systems Group Transparent Caching for RMA Systems

Zaheer Chothia
        

 

Centaur

 Centaur

Spring 2018


Time and Location

The lunch seminar is held every Friday from 12:15 to 13:15 at CAB E 72.

Lunch Seminar organizers:

Hantian Zhang, Alexandros Ziogas, Lukas Arnold, Hasan Hassan

 

The topic will be announced shortly before the talk.

Date Speaker Institute Topic Food
 23 February

David Dao

Systems Group

 AI, meet blockchain - Towards machine learning markets Roni Häcki (Bagel)
Niels Gleinig Systems Group Algebraic analysis of directed graphs
Melissa Licciardello Systems Group Adaptive Bitrate on Video Streaming: a reliable comparison 
Bojan Karlas Systems Group Introduction
 2 March

Sabir Akhadov

Systems Group 

 Pyspark at bare-metal speed David Sidler (Pizza)
Johannes Rausch Systems Group Introduction
Kaveh Razavi Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Introduction
 9 March Thomas Lemmin Systems Group Spectral Analysis of Fluorescently Labeled Amyloids Zaheer Chothia (Pizza)
 16 March Tal Ben Nun Systems Group Stateful Dataflow Multigraphs: A Data-Centric Bridge between Imperative and Spatial Programming Kaan Kara (Pizza)
23 March  David Cock Systems Group The Status of the Enzian Project Jeremie Kim (Pasta)
 13 April Konstantin Taranov Systems Group Fast and strongly-consistent per-item resilience in key-value stores Lukas Arnold (Sausage/ Tofu with potato salad)
Nora Hollenstein Systems Group & IBM Natural Language Processing @ DS3Lab
 20 April Gustavo Sutter Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Network traffic monitoring in multi-gigabit Ethernet  Alexandr Nigay (Bagel)
 27 April Can Alkan Bilkent University Characterization of genome structural variation and large inversions using high throughput sequencing Claude Barthels (Wraps)
 4 May

Lukas On Arnold

Systems Group 

 Covariance Matrix Calculation on a Hybrid FPGA/CPU System Melissa Licciardello (Pizza)
Marcin Copik Systems Group Introduction
Cédric Renggli Systems Group Introduction
11 May  Maciej Besta Systems Group To Push or To Pull: On Reducing Communication and Synchronzation in Graph Computations Merve Gürel (Dürüm)
 18 May

David Sidler

Systems Group 

 Processing-in-Network (PIN): A programmable NIC for data processing offloading Konstantin Taranov (Pizza)
Amit Kulkarni Systems Group Introduction
 25 May Arash Tavakkol Systems Group FLIN: Enabling Fairness and Enhancing Performance in Modern NVMe Solid State Drives Shaoduo Gan (Falafel)
 1 June Arseniy Zaostrovnykh EPFL A Formally Verified NAT J. de Fine Licht (Wraps)

 

Fall 2016


Time and Location

The lunch seminar is held every Friday from 12:15 to 13:15h at CAB E 72 (lunch provided at 12:00).

Lunch Seminar organizers:

Kaan Kara, Roni Häcki, Claude Barthels and Maciej Besta

 

The topic will be announced shortly before the talk.

Date Speaker Institute Topic Food
 23.09.  Claude Barthels  Systems Group  Distributed Joins on a Thousand Cores  Ingo Müller (Bagels)
 30.09.  Tim Harris  Oracle Labs  What does the operating system ever do for me?
  David Sidler (Pizza)
 07.10.  Zsolt István  Systems Group

Don’t let the size fool you! Smart distributed storage on specialized
hardware.

 Lucas Braun (Pie)
 14.10.  Torsten Hoefler  Systems Group

Scientific Benchmarking of Parallel Computing Systems

 Jana Giceva

(Nordsee)
 21.10.  Desi Dimitrova  Systems Group

Citius, Altius, Fortius: What a network controller should be?

 Simon Gerber

(Döner)
 28.10.  Maciej Besta  Systems Group High-Performance Distributed RMA Locks  Zaheer Chothia
 04.11.  Leo Tam  NVIDIA NVIDIA - Research  Sabela Ramos (Bagels)
 11.11.  Dan Alistarh  ETH Zurich

Architectural Support for Scalable Concurrent Data Structures

 David Cock
(Döner)
 18.11. Antonio Carzinaga USI Lugano

Descriptors, Locators, Identifiers:

Multi-Modal Addressing in the TagNet Information-Centric Networking Architecture

 Desi Dimitrova
(Sandwich)
 25.11.  Andreas Gerstlauer  UT Austin

Learning-Based System-Level Power and Performance Prediction

 Konstantin Taranov
(Pizza)
 02.12.  Lukas Humbel  Systems Group Modeling interrupt systems  Vojislav Dukic (Pie)
 09.12.  Ji Liu University of Rochester Asynchronous parallel optimization for large scale machine learning  Gerd Zellweger (Döner)
 16.12.  Renato Marroquin  Systems Group

READY: Completeness is in the Eye of the Beholder

  Arash Tavakkol

 

Thesis/Lab Projects Descriptions

 

Masters/Semester/Lab Projects (scroll down for Enzian and Sockeye thesis proposals)

 Master Thesis Projects:

  • Accelerating Machine Learning in Apache Arrow [MT/BT/Semester Project] (pdf)

  • An FPGA Framework for Deploying Forward Neural Networks [MT] (pdf)

  • Heracles: Efficient FPGA Engine for LSTM-based Neural Networks [MT] (pdf)

  • Compiling JSONiq to XQuery 3.1 [MT/BT] (pdf)

  • Extending Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) with Data Types [MT] (pdf)

  • 100 Gbit/s Key-Value Store [MT] (pdf)

  • Satellite-based low-latency Internet [MT/BT] (pdf)

  • De-anonymizing encrypted video streams [MT] (pdf)

  • DS3 Lab Project Proposals (Machine Learning, NLP/Computer Vision...)

  • Making machine learning friendlier in the cloud [MT] (pdf)

  • Bringing circuits switching back from the dead [MT] (pdf)

  • How un/fair is the Internet? [MT or BT] (pdf)

 Bachelor Thesis Projects

See proposals marked [MT or BT] above.

Enzian & Sockeye Thesis Projects

There are several thesis projects available within the Enzian and Sockeye projects:

  • System configuration management for hybrid HW/SW compute platforms [MT/BT] (pdf)
  • Abstraction and Modeling of Voltage Regulators [MT/BT] (pdf)
  • Towards high-assurance Board Management Controller software [MT/BT] (pdf)
  • Computer platform visualization for Enzian [BT] (pdf)
  • Sockeye - Address Space Equivalence [MT/BT] (pdf)
  • Sockeye - Performance Characteristics [MT/BT] (pdf)
  • Application of the CleanQ interface in the Linux Operating System [MT/BT] (pdf)
  • Network Stack Based on Device Queues [MT] (pdf)
  • Dynamic Power Management of OLTP Systems Using Reinforcement Learning [MT] (pdf)

Contact Timothy Roscoe (troscoe@inf.ethz.ch) if you are interested in any of them.