A Next Generation Computing and Communications Substrate

Welcome to the home page for the NSF CISE/EIA Research infrastructure grant CDA-97-03470, entitled "A Next Generation Computing and Communications Substrate".

Project Goals

Our goal is to develop technologies for a new computing and communications substrate that provides "access to anything, anytime, anywhere". Achieving this goal requires advances in three areas of research:

	low-latency, guaranteed-quality communications, which operate over variable bandwidth, asymmetric bandwidth, and wireless networks,
	scalable, reliable computing environments, which facilitate the development of distributed applications in the presence of failures, congestion and malicious users,

structured access to heterogeneous information, which enables data to be organized using the linguistic structure of text, the spatial structure of images, and the temporal structure of video.

At Cornell, we are developing systems that address key problems in each of these areas. However, several major issues currently prevent us from integrating these technologies into a new computing and communications substrate: (1) scalability, technologies which look promising in the lab must be validated at larger scales, (2) synergy, next-generation computing and communications systems require integration of software from several different research areas, (3) applicability, today's software needs to be developed with feedback from large numbers of users.

In order to address these issues, we propose to develop an integrated computing and communications testbed that will enable us to improve the scalability of our systems, provide a common code base for systems requiring components from different research groups, and evaluate our systems in everyday use.