Center for Networked Systems opens in San Diego

The University of California San Diego presented the Center for Networked Systems in a dedication and open house on July 23rd at the La Jolla campus. The CNS is an academic-industry collaboration that will focus on the technical, economic and market forces that drive adoption and proliferation of services delivered via complex networked systems. Details and quotes from researchers and industry participants about the Center can be found here: UCSD LAUNCHES UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY RESEARCH ALLIANCE TO ADDRESS CHALLENGES TO FUTURE SHARED NETWORKED SYSTEM INFRASTRUCTURES

The CNS was configured to explore and exploit the opportunities in pervasive and Grid computing, open dynamic systems and the challenges of shared network, computing and data resources. The Center’s founders and core research group believe that these network modalities will have as great an influence on economics, business and society in the next decade as Internet Protocol has in the last 10 years. However, critical to the adoption of services delivered on these networks are environments that are secure, robust, managed effectively and can reliably maintain high end-user quality. The Center is dedicated to investigating and assessing the technologies and systems that will be required for effectively assembling and managing these advanced networks.

The Jacobs School of Engineering, California Institute for Information Technology and Telecommunications (a partnership with UC Irvine) and San Diego Supercomputing Center form the academic backbone of the Center. Industry participants include Qualcomm, HP, Alcatel and AT&T. The Center will have an operating budget of approximately $10 million per year. Corporate members will inform research priorities, monitor advanced developments, provide internships, and send researchers to the facility for presentations and technical review sessions.

"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."

The goal of the CNS is to develop key technologies and frameworks for networked systems. Increasing network complexity requires multi-disciplinary collaborations to focus and prioritize both research and industrial initiatives to achieve intended progress and results. By collecting a critical mass of leading researchers and combining the strengths of industrial partners, CNS objectives are to accelerate research progress, address key challenges of enabling technologies, establish frameworks, and design systems for robust, secure systems and innovative applications.

Future large scale, shared resource infrastructures will be heterogeneous, multi-technology, multi-vendor, open collections of hardware, software, data and display devices joined by wired and wireless communications equipment. Networks will be globally distributed but locally optimized for need, scale and availability. One of the key research areas for CNS will be to understand how these components can be assembled into useful working environments and the technologies that will need to be developed by vendors and manufacturers to foster and promote this networked systems vision. The challenges will be predominantly along the lines of manageability, pricing/allocating costs, security, delivered end-user performance, interoperability and robustness in economically viable installations.

The CNS long-term aspirations are to design and implement research that will dramatically advance the state of networks and network technology. By bringing together dedicated research teams and industry leadership the Center will result in designs and demonstration projects of robust technologies that enable extensible networks that can increase performance without sacrificing usability, flexibility or manageability.

The research efforts will be grounded in fundamental metric-based analyses and evaluations and offer students and researchers the opportunity to concentrate on industry relevant research. Industrial partners will have access to insights and results about products, services and technology required to implement and operate these networks. Once established, the Center will organize around their academic orientation and industrial partnerships to advance the state of the art and knowledge foundation for the introduction, rapid adoption and acceptance of future networks and networked systems.