Computer Systems
Computer Systems
PI: Nuno Preguiça
The research goal of the Computer Systems (CS) group is to advance the development of computer systems that are more secure, reliable, and efficient. Computer systems are omnipresent in nearly every aspect of modern life, from entertainment and commerce to agriculture and healthcare. As society increasingly depends on these systems, the need to design dependable computer systems becomes ever more critical. Modern computer systems must be designed in ways that ensure that they can be fast, ensuring fast responses under any circumstances; reliable, providing service even in the face of device or network failures; and secure, protecting sensitive and private information while allowing authorized access to it. The computing infrastructures that support these systems have also become increasingly complex, being composed of a wide range of heterogeneous devices and networks. These infrastructures extend from cloud data centers to edge computing environments and include user and IoT devices.
The CS group focuses its research on the inherent challenges of building dependable computer systems within these evolving infrastructures, with emphasis on three strategic areas. In the context of Secure Systems, we are developing privacy and security technologies that ensure system usability and performance while being resilient in a post-quantum computing world and that can be effectively integrated into AI systems. In the context of Decentralized Systems, our research explores communication and distributed data management abstractions and algorithms to create systems whose operation can naturally extend from cloud to edge environments; in particular we are exploring how to support highly heterogeneous swarm-like intelligent systems and local-first software. In the domain of emerging infrastructures we investigate methods to unify distributed and parallel architectures in effective ways to address the growing scale and complexity of modern systems, with emphasis on reducing synchronization overhead and optimizing computations over partitioned data.
Members of the CS group regularly publish in top venues including VLDB, CCS, Usenix ATC, CRYPTO, EuroCrypt, OOPSLA, ICDE, and TCC. Contributions in distributed data management, notably CRDTs, and decentralized systems and protocols are internationally recognized, with industry adoption in systems serving millions of users. Group members’ activities include participation in IETF standardization processes, contributions to the Tor system, and participation in national cybersecurity initiatives.