News

Seattle: Harnessing Community Resources For Cloud Computing

By: Dr. Justin Cappos, NYU Poly

When: March 9, 2015 at 11:30 AM
Where:  Natural Sciences Fase II, Room  A-211

Traditional distributed computational models, such as client-server and cloud computing, involve moving computation from geographically distributed devices with little computational power to well-provisioned centralized servers.   In this work, we explore the idea of harnessing computational resources on end user devices in an on-demand, cross application manner.

Using this paradigm, we have constructed the Seattle testbed.  Seattle makes it practical for arbitrary Internet users to securely participate in our testbed without compromising the security or performance of their laptop, desktop, phone, tablet or other device.   Seattle has been deployed for six years across tens of thousands of end  user devices.  Seattle has widespread practical use as a testbed for researchers and educators, including use in more than 50 classes.  

The first part of this talk will give an overview and demo of the Seattle testbed.   The second part of the talk will discuss some of the research challenges involved in building the platform, notably providing a secure execution environment with a small trusted computing base.

Justin Cappos is an assistant professor at NYU in the Polytechnic School of Engineering. Justin's research interests generally fall broadly in the area of systems security.   He focuses on understanding high-impact, large-scale problems by building and measuring deployed systems. Prof. Cappos did his dissertation work describing flaws in prior Linux package managers and building / deploying a new security model.  His work on software update system security was deployed by the major Linux package managers (e.g. apt, yum, and YaST) and thus protects most Linux servers.   Due to the practical impact of his research, Prof Cappos was named in 2013 as one of Popular Science's Brilliant 10 scientists under 40.