Computer Scientists Scale “Layer 2” Data Center Networks to 100,000 Ports and Beyond

Radhika Niranjan Mysore (above) is a UC San Diego computer science graduate student and the first author and presenter of the SIGCOMM 2009 paper entitled "PortLand: A Scalable Fault-Tolerant Layer 2 Data Center Network Fabric.

"SIGCOMM was always a dream, and it was nice we could shoot for it," said Mysore.

Amin Vahdat (above) is the senior author on the SIGCOMM 2009 paper. Vahdat is a computer science professor at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. The SIGCOMM paper describes software created at the University of California, San Diego that the creators hope will lead to data centers that logically function as single, plug-and-play networks that will scale to the massive scale of modern data center networks.

A full prototype of PortLand, illustrated in Figure 1 from the paper, is currently running on a network in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

Hovav Shacham Describes Electronic Voting Machine Vulnerabilities on NPR Science Friday

Bravo Hovav Shacham (above left) ! The computer science professor from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering did a great job describing his computer security research on NPR Science Friday today.

Check out the 17 minute show here, which includes a great question from a voter in Louisiana, one of the states that uses a Sequoia voting machine that is similar to the one the researchers used to highlight safety vulnerabilities.

The key to all this work is return-oriented programming, which Shacham first described in 2007. Read the full press release here. Download the paper and watch videos here.

Nanomotors detect silver

NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang is part of a team of researchers from the United States and Germany who have found that the speed of synthetic "nanomotors" responds to nearby concentrations of silver. The followins is an excerpt from a news story in "Chemistry World," published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The discovery suggests that nanomotors could be used to detect trace levels of silver and other toxic substances in water supplies - a practice that has previously required bulky instrumentation. Nanomotors are nano-sized machines that can convert energy into motion. For a long time the only known nanomotors were biological and made from natural proteins, but in the last decade scientists have been able to create synthetic nanomotors with similar activity.

Alex Zettl, a nanomotor researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, thinks the work is exciting because it shows that local chemical reactions can change the visible motion of an object. 'Overall, this is beautiful work and it will very likely lead to more exciting discoveries in ion chemistry and nanoparticle propulsion,' he said.

Image above displaying the movement of five randomly selected nanomotors over three seconds in 11 different metal-nitrate salt solutions showing increased motion in the presence of silver © The American Chemical Society
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/August/14080901.asp

UC San Diego Robots Take Center Stage at National Robotics Conference

Robots created by UC San Diego engineers made their way to Austin, Texas recently. They took center stage during NI Week, the annual robotics extravaganza hosted by National Instruments.

During the keynote address, Tom Bewley, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, and his Ph.D. students Christopher Schmidt-Wetekam and Nick Morozovsky of the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab, gave live demonstrations of their third generation multimodal hopping rover, iHop, and their miniature treaded rover, Switchblade, which can both pop wheelies and climb relatively large stairs. Both designs feature advanced feedback control algorithms to stabilize various maneuvers, trading off static stability for enhanced agility.

The team also introduced iceCube, a self-propelled, self-guided sphere, which is actuated via internal control moment gyros and was designed and built by Ph.D. student Andrew Cavender.

View a video of the demos and keynote address here or at
http://zone.ni.com/wv/app/doc/p/id/wv-1705/upvisited/y

The video is about 12 minutes long. If you have just a few moments, check out the "Switchblade" rover at the 10:00 minute marker in the video. You'll get to see Switchblade pop a wheelie AND climb translucent stairs.

New Video: Computer Scientists Demo Voting Machine Vulnerability

Computer scientists demonstrated that criminals could hack an electronic voting machine and steal votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed. The team of scientists from University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University employed “return-oriented programming” to force a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine to turn against itself and steal votes. Read the academic paper and learn about the computer scientists at https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/groups/security/avc/





the same video is also available via YouTube:

Voting security video interview with Hovav Shacham

Above is a four minute video on voting machine security from Hovav Shacham, a UC San Diego computer science professor. Shacham and colleagues presented this work on Monday August 10, 2009 at the 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE 2009), the premier academic forum for voting security research.

The same video is also up on YouTube:

Images: Computer Scientists Take Over Electronic Voting Machine with New Programming Technique

Above are the three images from the pape“Can DREs Provide Everlasting Security? The Case of Return-Oriented Programming and the AVC Advantage” by Stephen Checkoway,University of California, San Diego; Ariel J. Feldman, Princeton University; Brian Kantor, University of California, San Diego; J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan; Edward W. Felten, Princeton University; Hovav Shacham, University of California, San Diego.

The computer scientists presented this work on August 10, 2009 at the 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE 2009), the premier academic forum for voting security research.