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UCSD ALLIANCE TO ADDRESS CHALLENGES TO SHARED INFRASTRUCTURES

The University of California-San Diego and four international technology leaders have committed approximately $9 million over three years to the Center for Networked Systems (CNS), a new university-industry alliance focused on developing technologies for robust, secure and open networked systems. The founding members include AT&T, Alcatel, Hewlett-Packard and QUALCOMM Inc, spanning a range of technology areas including enterprise computing, networking equipment and network operations. The contributions leverage more than $10 million in related research activities already underway at UCSD. CNS is a part of the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2], a partnership of UCSD and UC-Irvine.

"Networks and systems have converged, becoming complex systems in their own right. CNS is the first of its kind devoted specifically to understanding the contribution of networks, pervasive computing and Grids as systems," said CNS founding director Andrew Chien, who is the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the Jacobs School. "CNS will also blaze a new trail in its alliance with member companies, which will work closely with our faculty to address the most important obstacles to large, networked systems in both the consumer and enterprise arenas. We believe that some of these obstacles can only be removed through the deep, shared insights of industry and academic researchers."

Above and beyond their financial contributions, corporate members will inform Center research priorities, monitor breaking research developments, provide research internships, and send researchers to visit UCSD. "Through this collaborative effort, AT&T will be teaming with some of the world's most talented people on a common goal and sharing its unparalleled networking expertise as a catalyst for faster innovation throughout the industry," said Hossein Eslambolchi, president of AT&T Global Networking Technology Services and a key architect in founding the Center for Networked Systems at UCSD. "As more research is done in the university environment in partnership with scientists and engineers from different industry disciplines, their combined efforts will achieve greater results than industry or university researchers working independently."

"Tomorrow's networked system infrastructures will be multi-technology, multi-vendor, and multi-operator environments," said Jacobs School Dean Frieder Seible, host of the CNS launch ceremony. "The university recognizes that the only way to meet the challenge of designing these open, shared infrastructures is a focused, collaborative and multi-disciplinary approach with industry."

CNS builds on UCSD's established reputation in networking, systems and distributed systems, including Grids, large-scale and high-speed measurement, and monitoring of worms and denial-of-service attacks. A critical mass of 16 leading faculty and research scientists from UCSD's departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Cal-(IT)2 and the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) are participating in the center. CNS researchers will undertake fundamental and long-term research on key challenges to the success of networked systems: robustness; system and application security; manageability; and application/end-user quality of service.

"The emergence of Grid computing and pervasive connectivity has given rise to complex open, dynamic systems of global reach," said Larry Smarr, Cal-(IT)2 director and the Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Information Technologies in the Jacobs School. "Understanding the behavior of these networks as interdependent systems requires sophisticated online and offline measurement and analysis, as well as modeling and experimentation in which CNS will excel."

CNS expects to commit funding immediately to half a dozen projects, to be selected together with its industry members. Each project will attack a critical technical problem or framework, and each team will include a mix of experts from distributed systems, networking, and network elements. The first batch of multi-year projects is expected to cover topics ranging from large-scale network modeling and network security measurement, to the development of new routing architectures that take advantage of optical technologies in new ways.

"Collaborations between academia and industry foster an environment of innovation and understanding, and nowhere is that combination more important than in the development of open, secure network systems. The future of technologies such as Grid computing and advanced network systems are key elements to our business, and HP is pleased to be a founding member of the CNS program and to be able to contribute to the creation of open networked systems." Patrick Scaglia, vice president and director of Internet Computing Platforms Research Center at HP Labs.