Yuqi Xue

I am a ECE Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am advised by Prof. Jian Huang as a member of the Systems Platform Research Group. My research focus is on architectures and systems for hardware accelerators. More specifically, I am interested in both efficiency and security of accelerators.

Prior to my Ph.D. study, I obtained my Bachelor’s degree from UIUC in 2021.

Publications

System Virtualization for Neural Processing Units

Yuqi Xue, Yiqi Liu, and Jian Huang

In The 19th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems 2023

Bib

@inproceedings{npuvirt:hotos23,
  author = {Xue, Yuqi and Liu, Yiqi and Huang, Jian},
  title = {System Virtualization for Neural Processing Units},
  year = {2023},
  booktitle = {The 19th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems},
  series = {HotOS '23},
}

V10: Hardware-Assisted NPU Multi-tenancy for Improved Resource Utilization and Fairness

Yuqi Xue, Yiqi Liu, Lifeng Nai, and Jian Huang

In ISCA-50: 50th International Symposium on Computer Architecture 2023

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{v10:isca23,
  author = {Xue, Yuqi and Liu, Yiqi and Nai, Lifeng and Huang, Jian},
  title = {V10: Hardware-Assisted NPU Multi-tenancy for Improved Resource Utilization and Fairness},
  year = {2023},
  booktitle = {ISCA-50: 50th International Symposium on Computer Architecture},
  series = {ISCA '23},
}

IceClave: A Trusted Execution Environment for In-Storage Computing

Luyi Kang*, Yuqi Xue*, Weiwei Jia*, Xiaohao Wang, Jongryool Kim, Changhwan Youn, Myeong Joon Kang, Hyung Jin Lim, Bruce Jacob, and Jian Huang

In MICRO-54: 54th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture 2021

*Co-primary authors.

A short version is presented in NVMW’22.

Abs arXiv Bib PDF Slides Full Video Lightning Talk

In-storage computing with modern solid-state drives (SSDs) enables developers to offload programs from the host to the SSD. It has been proven to be an effective approach to alleviate the I/O bottleneck. To facilitate in-storage computing, many frameworks have been proposed. However, few of them treat the in-storage security as the first citizen. Specifically, since modern SSD controllers do not have a trusted execution environment, an offloaded (malicious) program could steal, modify, and even destroy the data stored in the SSD. In this paper, we first investigate the attacks that could be conducted by offloaded in-storage programs. To defend against these attacks, we build a lightweight trusted execution environment, named IceClave for in-storage computing. IceClave enables security isolation between in-storage programs and flash management functions that include flash address translation, data access control, and garbage collection, with TrustZone extensions. IceClave also achieves security isolation between in-storage programs by enforcing memory integrity verification of in-storage DRAM with low overhead. To protect data loaded from flash chips, IceClave develops a lightweight data encryption/decryption mechanism in flash controllers. We develop IceClave with a full system simulator. We evaluate IceClave with a variety of data-intensive applications such as databases. Compared to state-of-the-art in-storage computing approaches, IceClave introduces only 7.6% performance overhead, while enforcing security isolation in the SSD controller with minimal hardware cost. IceClave still keeps the performance benefit of in-storage computing by delivering up to 2.31x better performance than the conventional host-based trusted computing approach.
@inproceedings{iceclave:micro21, author = {Kang*, Luyi and Xue*, Yuqi and Jia*, Weiwei and Wang, Xiaohao and Kim, Jongryool and Youn, Changhwan and Kang, Myeong Joon and Lim, Hyung Jin and Jacob, Bruce and Huang, Jian}, title = {IceClave: A Trusted Execution Environment for In-Storage Computing}, year = {2021}, isbn = {9781450385572}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3466752.3480109}, doi = {10.1145/3466752.3480109}, booktitle = {MICRO-54: 54th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture}, pages = {199–211}, numpages = {13}, keywords = {Trusted Execution Environment, Security Isolation, In-Storage Computing, ARM TrustZone}, location = {Virtual Event, Greece}, series = {MICRO '21}, }