Trusted ILLIAC and Large-Scale Computing

The original ILLIAC computer, built by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1952, was the first computer in the world created and owned entirely by an educational institution. It weighed five tons and contained 2800 vacuum tubes.

On May 10, the University will officially launch the Trusted ILLIAC Cluster, which incorporates a 500-processor programmable hardware/software cluster designed and built by researchers at the Information Trust Institute (ITI) and Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) at Illinois. It promises to make large-scale computing truly trustworthy, providing an application-specific level of reliability and security in a transparent manner while delivering high performance.

According to CSL Director and ITI Chief Scientist Ravi Iyer, the need for greater security and reliability in computing has intensified as the industry begins to shift to what some have called "utility computing," "on-demand computing," or "adaptive enterprise computing."

"In this new generation, computing is seen as a utility,CC Iyer explained. "Just as you get electricity when you plug in, companies and institutions will be able to 'plug in' to a massive computer system that gives them greater performance."

"Utility computing" means that different companies share the same powerful cluster of processors to get their work done, increasing the need for higher levels of reliability and security. According to Iyer, utility computing will be a cheaper, more efficient way to meet the massive computing-power needs of banking, research, design, and many other commercial applications.

"At the end of the third year, we’ll have a full-fledged system that allows us to begin innovating," Iyer said. "Industry and other research collaborators will also be able to use the system as a testbed to develop a whole new set of ideas." Corporate supporters of Trusted ILLIAC include Hewlett-Packard, Advanced Micro Devices, and Xilinx. Trusted ILLIAC development is also supported by a National Science Foundation Critical Research Infrastructure (CRI) grant.

In addition to being reliable and secure, said Wen-mei Hwu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and ITI’s Theme Leader for Embedded and Enterprise Computing, the Trusted ILLIAC system will automatically adapt to the computing environment of specific applications.

"It’s like a chameleon," he said. "Trusted ILLIAC will be able to determine how it must configure itself to provide the best performance for an application­the best level of trust. It morphs itself to support that application." Part of the key to this adaptation is sophisticated middleware, which enables the many nodes of the Trusted ILLIAC to communicate with one another in a reliable and secure way, explained ITI Theme Leader in Multimedia and Distributed Systems and computer science professor Klara Nahrstedt.

According to CSL Director and ITI Chief Scientist Ravi Iyerr, the intellectual merit lies in investigating new set of application-aware methods to provide customized levels of trust (specified by the application) and enforced via an integrated approach involving re-programmable hardware, enhanced compiler methods to extract security and reliability properties and supported by a configurable OS and middleware.

"We plan to transform a large Linux based cluster, using augmented hardware (demonstrated via FPGA implementations), smart compilers capable of extracting and programming into hardware, application-specific reliability and security guarantees and supported by an Operating System and Middleware configured to support the application execution," added CSL Director and ITI Chief Scientist Ravi Iyer.

The Trusted ILLIAC research will even result in methods to validate levels of reliability and security, providing the first real way to benchmark the trustworthiness of large-scale computing systems.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:17 AM  Permalink