D-INFK news channel

Hidden in the hills of Lugano, the Alps supercomputer at CSCS is one of the world’s fastest – and greenest. In this BBC News feature, Prof. Torsten Hoefler of the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich explains how Alps is revolutionising climate research and AI with cutting-edge performance and eco-friendly design.

Students of the department have voted for their favourite lecturers and teaching assistants. The VIS Teaching Awards winners David Basin, Ghislain Fourny, Özlem Imamoglu and Johannes Lengler have been announced at the last Department Conference. Congratulations!

Maša Nešić and Eric Nothum, both D-INFK students at ETH Zurich, joined three fellow ETH students last September for the 3-day Bloomberg Security Challenge in New York. During the event, they engaged in discussions, coding sessions, and research focused on Text-to-SQL translation using small, open-source large language models. In the latest ETH Ambassadors blog post, they share their experiences in the Big Apple.

A research team at ETH Zurich, headed by Kaveh Razavi, an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Computer Science, discovered a new class of vulnerabilities in Intel processors, allowing them to break down barriers between different users of a processor using carefully crafted instruction sequences. Entire processor memory can be read by employing quick, repeated attacks.

Professor Peter Müller and his co-author have been awarded the prestigious ETAPS Test of Time Award for their paper “A Basis for Verifying Multi-threaded Programs”. The ETAPS Test of Time Award has been established to recognise outstanding papers published more than 10 years ago. Congratulations!