System software, such as operating systems, application runtimes and hypervisors, are critical to modern IT infrastructure. Millions of applications are built with or running on top of system software. On one side, the system software is increasingly becoming more complex in code size and functionality; one bug could cause millions of devices to be attacked. On the other side, the “end of Moore’s Law” has forced chip vendors to advance performance and energy efficiency boundaries elsewhere, notably by designing radically different hardware, such as multi-core and heterogeneous-core chips; a gap exists for applications to fully utilize these new varieties of hardware. In this talk, I will first talk about the OS kernel-level security hardening problem and our solution, then I will present our works on system support for running applications on top of heterogeneous architecture hardware. I will also discuss our recent work on lightweight computation relocation over machine nodes of heterogeneous architectures with process rewriting and share our thoughts in this research direction.

Xiaoguang Wang is a Research Assistant Professor at the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Virginia Tech, and before that, as a Postdoc researcher. He received his Ph.D. degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University in China. He was also a visiting Ph.D. student at Florida State University. His research interests focus on system and software security, including system support for heterogeneous architectures and software system security. In particular, his efforts have been focused on building secure systems on (with) virtualization, operating system kernel, application runtime, and compiler.