überSpark: Practical, Provable, End-to-End Guarantees on Commodity Heterogenous Interconnected Computing Platforms

Abstract

Today’s computing ecosystem, comprising commodity heterogeneous interconnected computing (CHIC) platforms, is increasingly being employed for critical applications, consequently demanding fairly strong end-to-end assurances. However, the generality and system complexity of today’s CHIC stack seem to outpace existing tools and methodologies towards provable end-to-end guarantees. This paper describes our on-going research, and presents überSpark†, a system architecture that argues for structuring the CHIC stack around Universal Object Abstractions (üobjects), a fundamental system abstraction and building block towards practical and provable end-to-end guarantees. überSpark is designed to be realizable on heterogeneous hardware platforms with disparate capabilities, and facilitates compositional end-to-end reasoning and efficient implementation. überSpark also supports the use of multiple verification techniques towards properties of different flavors, for development compatible, incremental verification, co-existing and meshing with unverified components, at a fine granularity, and wide applicability to all layers of the CHIC stack. We discuss the CHIC stack challenges, illustrate our design decisions, describe the überSpark architecture, present our foundational steps, and outline on-going and future research activities. We anticipate überSpark to retrofit and unlock a wide range of unprecedented end-to-end provable guarantees on today’s continuously evolving CHIC stack.