Research Initiatives Projects

The Internet has created a world of universal connectivity, where any two devices can communicate as long as they are both connected to the Internet. The Internet architecture is a miraculous feat of engineering, remaining largely unchanged while scaling from an early prototype to the centerpiece of the global communications infrastructure. Having grown to such an unprecedented scale, the Internet is now the victim of its own success in that the Internet’s core protocol, IP, is now embedded in every router and thus is essentially impossible to change in any fundamental way. Yet to achieve goals like better performance and greater security, it is clear that the Internet must eventually change. The central technical question facing the Internet is thus: can we fundamentally change the Internet without changing IP?

In this project, researchers at ICSI argue that the answer to this question is most definitely “yes”. Leveraging insights from the large private networks recently built by cloud and content providers and a long line of academic research, they describe an approach called the Extensible Internet (EI).

The difficulty of automated testing and discovery in interoperability depends on information explicitly known. Interoperability remains a challenging unsolved problem that depends on manual error-prone solutions and costs billions annually. The goal of this research is to investigate automated approach to verification and discovery of interoperability based on recently developed theory of property-based interoperability. This may enable the next generation of automatically composable and reconfigurable systems.

Funding provided by DARPA

This collaborative project led by LLNL is part of the DARPA TRAnsforming DESign (TRADES) program, and focuses on modeling, analysis and synthesis of complex parameterized multi-scale material structures.

A key ingredient of any scenario in cloud-based design and manufacturing  and, more generally, in cybermanufacturing is the notion of virtualization of software and hardware resources in terms of open, interoperable and composable services. Such virtualization has proved challenging because modern manufacturing information systems are conceived and implemented as a federated integration of proprietary software tools that communicate via customized translators or by exchanging variety of neutral file formats.

This project leverages technology to significantly reduce the cost of political campaigns via the sharing economy, and thus undercut the impact of money on politics (http://benefunder.org/causes/84/nelson-morgan). While the technology is important, the resulting structural change is more so; designing an efficient “supply chain” of services between a skilled citizen force and the campaigns (see http://uprisecampaigns.org for the beginnings of a separate spinoff organization to implement these ideas in real campaigns).

Researchers are designing algorithms to allocate resources in datacenters and clouds that can't be manipulated by users. In datacenters and clouds, computing resources or individual machines are allocated to users based on the requirements of the jobs they want to run. Users can manipulate allocations by misreporting their requirements. In this project, researchers design algorithms that are less susceptible to such manipulation. They will also use algorithmic mechanism design and game theory to develop general procedures for converting protocols so that they can't be manipulated.

A long-term goal of computational molecular biology is to extract, from large data sets, information about how proteins work together to carry out life processes at a cellular level. We are investigating protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, in which the vertices are the proteins within a species and the edges indicate direct interactions between proteins. Our goal is to discover conserved protein modules: richly interacting sets of proteins whose patterns of interaction are conserved across two or more species.