Red Hat Collaboratory Developments in the new RHRQ

BY KENNETH RUDOLPH

The new issue of the Red Hat Research Quarterly (RHRQ) explores developments in projects associated with the Red Hat Collaboratory. The issue provides updates on the smart village project funded by the Collaboratory’s inaugural Research Incubation Awards, the BU and Red Hat collaboration “Morphuzz”, and the newly-funded undergraduate student research projects.

Smart Communities

Red Hat and BU researchers are working together to develop smart communities using open source technologies through the project “Creating a global open research platform to better understand social sustainability using data from a real-life smart village.” 

Red Hat researchers Alexandra Machado, Jim Craig, and Christopher Tate and BU researchers Christos Cassandras, Vasiliki Kalavri, John Liagouris, and Mayank Varia are scaling up smart village systems used in Veberöd, Sweden for new use cases in larger cities. The researchers are using an event-based paradigm for their algorithms, instead of a time-based paradigm, which uses significantly less computations and makes these smart technologies more secure. 

The researchers hope to continue developing and scaling smart technologies and even create new technologies to promote social sustainability in these smart communities.

To read more about their research in the RHRQ, click here.  

Morphuzz

Fuzz testing is a popular technique used to identify bugs in software before it is implemented to keep it safe from malicious attacks. The only problem with fuzz testing is that it requires extensive manually written code descriptions to debug the software. This, combined with the constantly evolving and improving technology of virtual machines (VMs), creates a scalability problem. To solve this problem, Bandan Das, an engineer at Red Hat, and Alexander Bulekov, a PhD Candidate in Computer Engineering at BU, created Morphuzz, a technique for fuzz testing virtual machines. The researchers hope to adapt and optimize Morphuzz for use on the Linux kernel, an integral piece of many operating systems, and make fuzz testing more efficient.

To read more about Morphuzz in the RHRQ, click here. 

Student Research Projects

This past year, the Red Hat Collaboratory funded undergraduate student research projects around cloud computing, systems engineering infrastructure, and security. The MOC Alliance is enabling these projects by providing students with an open cloud infrastructure to conduct their research without the costs typically associated with systems research. In an interview with Red Hat Research, Xiteng Yao, an undergraduate student researcher in Computer Engineering, and Ari Trachtenberg, a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, discuss the project and how vital students are to the Red Hat Collaboratory’s mission and driving open source systems research forward.

To read more about the project in the RHRQ, click here.