Application-Aware Reliability and Security: The Trusted ILLIAC Approach

Trusted ILLIAC is a reliable and secure cluster-computing platform being built at the University of Illinois Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) and Information Trust Institute (ITI), involving faculty from Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science Departments. Trusted ILLIAC is intended to be a large, demonstrably trustworthy cluster-computing system to support what is variously referred to as on-demand/utility computing or adaptive enterprise computing. Such systems require that a significant number of applications co-exist and share hardware/software resources using a variety of containment boundaries. Current solutions aim at providing hardware and software solutions that can only be described as one-size-fits-all approaches. Today´s environments are complex, expensive to implement, and nearly impossible to validate. The challenge is to provide an application-specific level of reliability and security in a totally transparent manner, while delivering optimal performance. A promising approach lies in developing a new set of application-aware methods that provide customized levels of trust (specified by the application) enforced using an integrated approach involving reprogrammable hardware, enhanced compiler methods to extract security and reliability properties, and the support of configurable operating system and middleware. Our approach is to demonstrate such a set of integrated techniques that span entire system hierarchy: processor hardware, operating system, middleware, and application