Associate Professor Hsien-Hsin Sean Lee and his Ph.D. student, Jen-Cheng (Tommy) Huang, along with their HP collaborators Matteo Manchiero and Yoshio Turner, won the Best Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems, held October 3-4, 2011 in Brooklyn, N.Y. Dr. Lee and Mr. Huang are based in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.

The team won the award for their paper entitled "Ally: OS-Transparent Packet Inspection Using Sequestered Cores." “Ally” performs packet processing services (e.g., deep packet inspection) using sequestered, privileged processing cores of a multi-core system. This research is an extension of the team's earlier work–“introspective computing”–sponsored by the NSF CAREER program. Ally enables distributed deployment of compute-intensive management services throughout a datacenter. It uniquely allows these services to be deployed independent of the arbitrary OS and/or hypervisor that users may choose to run on the remaining cores, with strong hardware isolation preventing the host from tampering with the management environment. As more and more computing services are being shifted to the cloud, systems such as Ally will enable rich network services using highly programmable multi-core processors and solidify the availability, reliability, and security of datacenter operations.