Fellowship award for IC Midgard researcher
Siddharth Gupta © EPFL 2021
As the cutting-edge technology Midgard gains momentum, one of its key researchers has been rewarded for his work by Qualcomm Technologies.
Cloud computing has grown massively in importance in our modern society relying heavily on the use of virtual memory, with one data server running many services for many different customers all at the same time. Midgard is a recently developed technology that can allow for growing memory capacity, while continuing to guarantee the security of the data of each user in the cloud services with minimal overhead. The principle investigators of this project are based at the universities of Yale, Edinburgh and EPFL.
The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship rewards excellent young researchers in the field of AI and cybersecurity with individual prizes of $40,000, dedicated mentors from the Qualcomm Technologies team, and the opportunity to present their work in person to an audience of technical leaders at the company’s headquarters in San Diego. The award was only given to four recipients in Europe this year.
Siddharth Gupta, a doctoral researcher at the Parallel Systems Architecture Lab, part of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL, has been named as one of the recipients of this prestigious prize. Supervised by Prof. Babak Falsafi and Abhishek Bhattacharjee, Siddharth was selected for his proposal: “Rebooting Virtual Memory with Midgard.” Gupta’s proposal addresses the problem of large memory outgrowing existing capacities by minimizing the hardware needed for memory protection that could otherwise be used for computation.
Gupta proposes to reorganise memory, optimizing it with an innovative, highly efficient namespace for access and protection control. An intermediate layer - the Midgard layer - renders possible staggering gains in performance for data servers as memory grows, without requiring a change in modern operating systems (e.g., Linux, Android, macOS, iOS).