Services Science and Technology: CITRIS Project

Today’s computing has been a great success. Healthcare, financial, communication, and entertainment industries rely heavily on data centers. By some estimates, the amount of data processed in data centers is doubling every year. At this pace, there will be needs for many ultrahigh-performance data centers processing 1000 times more data in the next decade.

Today, approximately 50% of kindergartners in the United States are from families with one or more risk factors for school failure. Lack of school readiness for children from disadvantaged backgrounds due to social, physical, or economic factors is related to inadequate language, literacy, and early math experiences in early childhood. Schools in Oakland California, with students’ diverse socioeconomic background, face such challenges.

The capture of sensory data in three spatial dimensions in real time from multiple physically separate spaces, the projection of the data into shared virtual environments, and the projection of the virtual environments into immersive physical environments, constitute the emerging technology of tele-immersion.

PlanetLab is an open, globally distributed testbed for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale network services. There are currently more than 220 machines at 100 sites world-wide available to support both short-term experiments and long-running network services.

Collaboration and information-sharing are among the most important applications of computing. Privacy is a basic human need.

What is commonly considered the World Wide Web is a small fraction of the data available on the Internet. The volume of hypertext accessible to conventional search engines is 400 to 550 times smaller than the 7.5 petabytes of networked databases from directory services, information portals, scientists, government agencies and other providers. Our goal is to explore the mechanisms for and consequences of aggressively leveraging this underutilized resource.

SMETE.ORG agrees to work with MERLOT to meet the objectives outlined in the proposal "The NSDL Collaboration Finder: Connecting Projects for Effective and Efficient NSDL Development." NSDL means National Science Digital Library.

The Berkeley UPC Team will collaborate with Etnus to build a debugger for the Berkeley UPC Compiler. UPC is a parallel language that uses an explicitly parallel global address space programming model. Commercial implementations of UPC exist for some machines based on compilers that generate native code for a particular architecture. To enable ubiquitous access to the UPC language, the Berkeley UPC Team has developed a prototype UPC compiler that is designed for maximum portability.

The proposal contains four major computational themes, which are linked in various ways.

Quantum Computation: a study of novel quantum algorithms, of entanglement as a computational resource, and of connections to fundamental issues in quantum physics, such as the transition from classical to quantum.

Modeling the Regulatory Processes of the Cell: in the post-genomic era, the computational modeling of the operation of an entire cell at the level of interactions among genes, proteins and environmental conditions.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have the potential to benefit society in a myriad of ways, such as accelerating scientific research, increasing productivity, and enhancing security. WSNs also pose many fascinating scientific challenges, ranging from device physics to encoding techniques to distributed algorithms. There is a large, diverse, and rapidly increasing network literature in this area. Unfortunately, much of this work has been done in isolation; all too often individual components are crafted and evaluated without an overall vision or a context for deployment.

We are developing theories, software, and computational tools for the hierarchical modeling of distributed hybrid and embedded systems by providing technologies for their composable specification, analysis, simulation, and synthesis.
We shall help survey the state-of-the-art in hybrid and embedded system technology. The Berkeley contribution to the report will focus on established research projects and major industrial R&D and standardization efforts.

Our critical infrastructures continue to be vulnerable to cyber attack, and the nation is at risk from the convergence of cyber attack and more traditional terrorist activities. As the Internet has become pervasive and all of our critical infrastructures inextricably tied to information systems, we are increasingly at risk for economic, social and physical disruption through the rampant insecurities of information systems today. The urgent application of cyber defense technologies is required in order to adequately protect the nation's information infrastructures.

Standard setting was rarely practiced so extensively as it has been in cyberspace so far. Acknowledging this unique regulative technique, the Clinton administration originally had made "industry self-regulation" its guiding principle for standardizing the net. So far, this principle has not been changed by the succeeding administration. This paper is a historical and conceptual critical assessment of that standardzation policy, examined through the prism of comparative institutional theory.

The University of California at Berkeley has been given a grant to design,prototype, implement and evaluate a new search system for bioscience literature. There are significant components of the project that deal with processing of language as it is naturally spoken or written, the design of the search screen and how it works, as well as basic database design and implementation.

Our practice of disseminating, accessing and using information, especially scholarly information, is still significantly impeded by the legacy of pre-electronic media. While overcoming these impediments will require many elements, there are opportunities for technological innovation to support new and better practices. For example, journals exist in their traditional forms at least partly because of the value of the peer review process, which thus far has not yielded to decentralized, distributed, and timely mechanisms of the Web.