As the processor-memory performance gap continues to widen, application performance becomes increasingly limited by the memory system. Applications that employ linked data structures (LDSs) are particularly challenging from the standpoint of the memory system because of the memory serialization eeects associated with indirect memory addressing. Also known as the pointer chasing problem, such me...

As high GHZ processors become prevalent, adding hardware support to ensure the correctness and security of programs will be just as important, for the average user, as further increases in processor performance. The goal of our research is to focus on developing compiler and hardware support for efficiently performing software checks that can be left on all of the time, even in production code ...

Pointer analysis has been studied for over two decades. It answers the following question – For variables of pointer types, what are the set of objects they may point to at runtime. The analysis is also called Points-to analysis. Pointer analysis is used in a variety of applications, including live variable analysis for register allocation and constant propagation, static checking of potential ...

In order to analyze programs that manipulate pointers, it is necessary to have safe information about what each pointer might point to. There are many algorithms that can be used to determine this information, with varying degrees of accuracy. However, there has been very little previous work that addresses how much the relative accuracies of different pointer-analysis algorithms affect “transi...

We show that setting a reasonable frame skip can be critical to the performance of agents learning to play Atari 2600 games. In all of the six games in our experiments, frame skip is a strong determinant of success. For two of these games, setting a large frame skip leads to state-of-the-art performance. The rate at which an agent interacts with its environment may be critical to its success. I...

Can the availability of poorly-designed government insurance alter technology adoption decisions? A theoretical model of technology adoption and insurance incentive effects for a highand low-risk technology is developed and explored empirically using a unique dataset of skip-row agronomic trial data. A multivariate nonparametric resampling technique is developed, which augments the trial data w...

The WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) is a part of IEEE 802.11 standard designed for protecting over-the-air communication. While almost all of the WLAN (Wireless LAN) cards and the APs (Access Points) support WEP, a serious key recovery attack (aka FMS attack) was identified by Fluhrer et al. The FMS attack can basically be prevented by skipping IVs (Initial Values) used in the attack, but naive ...

Large inverted indices are by now common in the construction of web-scale search engines. For faster access, inverted indices are indexed internally so that it is possible to skip quickly over unnecessary documents. The classical approach to skipping dictates that a skip should be positioned every √ f document pointers, where f is the overall number of documents where the term appears. We argue...