Joseph Pasquale - US grants

This Presidential Young Investigator is performing research in large distributed computer systems with adaptive decentralized resource control, i.e., collections of decision-making agents which reside on a geographically distributed set of computers and which control resources so that work can be carried out in an integrated and coordinated fashion. Finding good methods for adaptive decentralized control addresses the question of how to make task and resource allocation choices correctly and efficiently in light of the formidable problems which arise as a result of distributing control. Probably the most difficult of these problems is that multiple agents must make good fast coordinated decisions based on uncertain and differing views of the global system state. The research approach is experimental. The Principal Investigator will create a laboratory to work on problems of load balancing, network routing and distributed sensing and interpretation. The laboratory will consist of multiple workstations with a file server, interconnected by a variety of different networks for work on decentralized coordination protocols under different topologies, a general purpose multiprocessor allowing for experiments to be conducted with notes acting as controlling agents numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and development software, including prototype object-oriented programming environments and expert system environments.//

9320436 Jain Improved computational methods and information management tools are critical in order to enhance the national competitive edge across broad sectors of the economy and to make rapid progress in education, medicine, global change analysis and several other aspects of scientific endeavor. Until recently, information in computers was almost always in alpha-numeric form, but today, alpha-numeric information seems very restricting in our interactions with computers. We need multimedia systems that will seamlessly manage audio, video, graphics, alpha-numeric and several other forms of information. To meet these new demands, many aspects of multimedia computing are being addressed by researchers at the University of California, San Diego. This award provides equipment to support active research projects in the emerging areas of multimedia computing in the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. The massive storage equipment will be used for several research projects covering many important areas of multimedia computing: multimedia servers, networking, operating systems, and databases. This equipment will also facilitate joint research projects in distributed multimedia information systems. The massive storage will help to take some of the algorithms and studies to the level of realistic prototypes. In addition, the equipment will also be available to other researchers developing multimedia tools in robotics, artificial intelligence, health care, manufacturing and other related areas. ***

EIA-98-02219
Joseph Pasquale
University of California, San Diego

CISE Research Infrastructure: The UCSD Active Web

UCSD is investigating system and application support issues for a next-generation World Wide Web, called the "Active Web." The Active Web is premised on the support for active content, content that is rich in multimedia and references to other objects, and for mobile agents, programs that can move about and execute on remote servers, carrying out requests at a distance on behalf of clients. These servers are no longer passive databases as in today's Web, but context-sensitive knowledge networks that contain all kinds of active content. Between the servers, there is a constant exchange of agents, which add to, refine, form interconnections, and make consistent, the distributed content. In the Active Web, there is a high degree of resource sharing, usage is bought and sold as in a market economy, and security is paramount. This grant will allow UCSD to purchase large-scale computer and storage servers and a high-speed network that will connect the various laboratories, and will form a small-scale Active Web prototype.

The project is taking a department-wide coordinated approach, integrating the research efforts in systems, security, multimedia, content-based search, scientific metacomputing, and, tools for software/hardware design and analysis.

In the future, in the digital fabric, computing elements will be distinguished by their networked bandwidth, compute and data capabilities, and of course their particular input/output capabilities (e.g. graphical displays, cameras, GPS, laser range-finding, etc.). These elements will be knit into large scale distributed applications and resource pools - together an entity increasingly known as the "computational grid". The key capabilities of a "Grid" element will be determined largely by their communication and input/output capabilities.

We propose a research infrastructure (FWGrid) that enables research in innovative and radically new applications, systems and system architectures, and the emerging technical and even social use of systems and services built for technology environment of the future. The key aspects of this infrastructure are:
o highly capable mobile image/video capture and display devices (to interact with the world)
o high bandwidth wireless 100-500 Mbps (to tightly couple mobile elements to high capability resources),
o rich wired networks of 10-100Gbps (move and aggregate data and computation without limit), and
o distributed clusters with large compute (teraflops) and data (10's of terabytes) capabilities (to power the infrastructure).

Broader Impact: FWGrid will enable us to explore with real systems and users, radical new applications, novel application structures, system architecture, resource management policies, innovative algorithms, as well as system management. It will fundamentally enhance undergraduate and graduate education and all activities of the department. Because FWGrid will be a "living laboratory", we will gain access to real users and actual workloads. FWGrid models the world of five years hence, where widespread high bandwidth wireless, extreme wired (fiber) bandwidth, and plentiful wired computing and data resource are the norm. FWGrid will be used to support a wide variety of research, ranging from low-level network measurement and analysis, to grid middleware and modeling, to application-oriented middleware and new distributed application architecture and finally to higher level applications using rich image and video - both off and on line.

FWGrid will have a transformative impact on the department, accelerating our growth into experimental computer science, continuing the transform and broaden both undergraduate and graduate education, providing a modern Grid infrastructure on which to perform research experiments, but one that also extends to wireless and peer-to-peer computing/storage. Because of the fortuitous timing with respect to our new CSE building, the infrastructure will have a deep impact on the department's educational, research, and social environment. It will support experimental research, multi-faculty and multi-disciplinary collaborative research and education. FWGrid will form a nexus for systems research within the department, and couple all of us to researchers on the campus, to SDSC and CalIT2, the metropolitan area, and wide area at high bandwidth. This will enable innumerable shared experiments and collaboration. In short, it will couple us to the future at high speed.

This proposal is developing a set of technologies to create federated content distribution utilities that support the simultaneous delivery of a wide variety of content to overlapping sets of clients with statistical quality of service assurances. The federated content distribution infrastructure will: i) simultaneously meet the performance demands of high-bandwidth and low-latency content delivery and the resource allocation constraints of constituent service providers; ii) weather a variety of attacks both from the outside and from self-interested or malicious nodes directly participating in the protocol; iii) incorporate basic algorithms for distributing content under a wide variety of dynamic network conditions. Because the infrastructure is shared by a variety of applications and hosted by a number of mutually distrustful administrative domains, the system must provide mechanisms that both adjudicate among competing applications and allow each administrative domain to maintain its own resource allocation policies.

If successful this research will effect a qualitative shift in: i) the way in which data is distributed across the Internet; ii) basic algorithms for determining optimal data distribution strategies across arbitrary data meshes; iii) the levels of reliability
and performance that can be achieved in critical nation-wide or global-scale event notification systems (e.g., the air-traffic control system); and iv) the ability of resource-poor providers to harness federated distribution utilities to publish urgent content such as Internet worm or virus signatures on a global scale.

Longitudinal studies of network systems are very difficult to conduct when systems are large, heterogeneous, highly interconnected, and open; yet, the importance of these studies cannot be underestimated. This project focuses on an 18-month longitudinal study on server-side vulnerabilities in the campus network of the University of California at San Diego and on client-side vulnerabilities the University of California at Davis. The issues concern the efficacy of security measures at the campus-wide networks and its implication for security of networked systems at universities, government facilities, and commercial enterprises.