January 26, 2005

Faculty Members Brief Industry Partners At CNS Research Review

By Doug Ramsey

The University of California, San Diego’s Center for Networked Systems (CNS) held its first formal research review since the center’s launch in July. On January 19 and 20, faculty researchers updated delegates from CNS’s five industry members on the status of the center’s seven inaugural projects, and laid the groundwork for a new round of projects as well as the center’s first summer research program that will send UCSD students to work in the labs of members AT&T, Alcatel, Hewlett Packard, QUALCOMM, and Sun Microsystems.

“Our reviews are a way to build a model of engagement and ongoing collaboration between industry and academic researchers in the field of networked systems,” said CNS director Andrew Chien, the SAIC Chair Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering. “It’s a chance to cross-fertilize opportunities for internships as well as one-on-one collaborations with industry.”

Roughly a dozen graduate students are now working on CNS projects, and their work was showcased at a poster session attended by industry partners, students, and university officials. CNS summer internships for 2005 will be announced at the end of February. Noted Chien: “These summer projects will be cutting-edge research to support the ongoing success of CNS and its interaction with industry research departments.”

Looking ahead, Chien indicated that CNS will recruit a few more industry partners as part of a deliberate plan for rapid but staged growth. “Research review is a great opportunity to seed new projects,” said Chien, encouraging industry participants to provide guidance on high-value research areas. Current projects run for two years, and a new set of two-year projects will be announced in July. From then on, CNS would be engaged in roughly 14 research projects at any one time – and possibly more. Faculty will propose specific new projects in June, and the CNS industrial advisory board will meet to consider the projects in July.

Mid-summer 2005 is also when CNS expects to occupy space for its headquarters and a core of researchers in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) building at UCSD. CNS is part of both Calit² and the Jacobs School, and Calit2 director Larry Smarr told attendees that the two organizations have overlapping agendas. “We are looking at the future of the Internet not only from the wireless and photonic sides, but also the middleware and all the way down to the devices that are going to be in this ubiquitous presence worldwide over the next fifteen or twenty years,” said Smarr, who holds the Harry E. Gruber Chair in the CSE department. “Calit2 and CNS are also creating a persistent, collaborative framework for working closely with industry.” He noted the synergies between CNS and Calit2, including Chien’s role as architect of the system software on the OptIPuter, an NSF-funded project led by Smarr.

During the two-day research review, investigators on each of CNS’s seven projects presented their progress to date. Chien briefed on the two projects he is leading. One is joint work with CSE professor Amin Vahdat and the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s KC Claffy on “modeling large-scale dynamic Internet and Grid behavior.” He also talked about a second project which is extending complex mapping and resource techniques from data centers to the grid environment, called “modeling and resource management for enterprise and grid infrastructures.”

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) professor Anthony Acampora outlined his work with Rene Cruz and graduate student Leiying Du on “a last mile solution supporting fixed point and mobile services.” “I believe this is one of the last true remaining problems in modern telecommunications,” said Acampora. “We need to hook up small and medium-sized businesses to the 95 percent of Class A buildings in the United States that are within a mile of the presence of optical fiber already in the ground.” His solution: free-space optical technologies.

CSE professor Stefan Savage is leading an effort on Internet epidemiology to build the technology to automatically capture and analyze large-scale worm, virus, and auto-routing activity. The project is being done in tandem with the new Collaborative Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses, funded by the NSF, and led by Savage.

Three other CSE faculty members outlined progress to date in their CNS projects. In a study of cross-layer wireless measurement, Geoff Voelker said his team is progressing from single-hop analysis in the first year, to multi-hop in the second year of the project. Alex Snoeren spoke about resource allocation in federated, distributed computing infrastructures, and Joseph Pasquale discussed quality of service-based network services architecture for overlay networks.

Also speaking at the CNS Research Review was Keith Marzullo. The CSE professor was invited to brief industry partners on a joint project with researchers Matti Hiltunen and Rick Schlichting at AT&T. They are studying “fault tolerance for grid services,” a topic of interest to many of the center’s industry partners.

Media Contact: Doug Ramsey, (858) 822-5825