New National Science Foundation center to launch at engineering college

April 9, 2008

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Industry and government officials will meet today and Thursday to discuss a new National Science Foundation-sponsored center headquartered at the University of Florida College of Engineering.

The “stakeholders meeting” for the NSF Center for Autonomic Computing will set the agenda for the center, which was established in January to seek ways to make large computer networks less dependent on constant care by system administrators.

“The need for autonomic computing comes from the fact that most information technology systems are either too large or too complex to be managed easily and in a cost-efficient manner,” said Jose Fortes, director of the center, professor and AT&T Eminent Chair in UF’s department of electrical and computer engineering. “With autonomic computing, you could have systems that are self-managed to some extent, and ideally they would take care of themselves without human supervision or intervention.”

Fortes said the large networked computer systems are less and less expensive to acquire because of the plummeting price of computing power. As a result, universities and government increasingly rely on systems comprising hundreds or even thousands of computers. Search engine companies such as Google, banking institutions, the aviation industry and many others depend on such complex networked systems, he said.

The problem, he said, is that the larger and more complicated the networked systems become, the more maintenance and management they require, with salaries for system administrators offsetting the price reductions in the hardware. “The management and its potential failures become a huge burden, one that reaches into the billions of dollars,” he said.

In addition, more computers use more electricity and must dissipate more heat, which also raises costs that need to be managed, he said.

The goal of the Center for Autonomic Computing is to develop ways to make the systems less reliant on human administrators, more efficient energy users and more resilient against failures, viruses or other security problems, Fortes said.

The solution won’t involve a silver bullet, but rather design changes and advances to the hardware, software and other major elements of the systems, he said. Fixing the problem may also may involve a philosophical shift away from traditional, top-down management and control toward a more biologically based, organic approach, or perhaps a combination of old and new approaches, he said.

“The idea would be that each component does something that is extremely simple, but together they achieve the desired behavior,” he said. “The analogy is to how swarms of bees or fish behave as individuals and as a collective unit.”

The center’s annual budget of about $1 million is funded by NSF’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers Program, UF and more than two dozen industry partners including IBM, Microsoft, Northrop-Grumman, Merrill Lynch, Intel and Citrix. The University of Arizona and Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, are partners with UF in the center.