LCSR/DCS Explorer
Rutgers University
Department of Computer Science/The Laboratory for Computer Science Research
These are exciting, if unsettling, times for our discipline. There are abundant scientific and technological challenges in computer science, though funding from both federal, state, and private sources is increasingly unstable. Academia is trying to cope with ubiquitous personal computing and rapidly advancing multimedia technologies which in conjuction with communications and distributed software methods (via internet with Netscape and Java, etc.) promise to raise interesting challenges to the traditional role of universities [see Electronics and the Dim Future of the University in the 13 October,1995 issue of Science].
From the LCSR/DCS perspective, we are happy to say that within this maelstorm we are not only holding our own, but advancing with many scientific and technological innovations in computer science, including systems for mobile, wireless distributed computing in the DATAMAN project, the knowledge and model-based automated engineering design of the HPCD project, and the iconic reasoning, imaging, and reporting systems of the Rutgers Knowledge-Based Medical Imaging Project. LCSR/DCS Faculty, graduate students, and staff are also tackling challenging scientific problems in their specialties, which include the areas of algorithms, artificial intelligence, computer theory, networking, numerical methods, programming languages, systems and architectures, and computer vision.
Our faculty has grown and our students have the chance to not only work on the projects directly supervised by our LCSR faculty, but also on the many interdisciplinary efforts with researchers in other departments and centers at Rutgers, at UMDNJ, and collaborating universities and industry laboratories.
Total funding for LCSR has risen this year to an all-time high of over $19 million in committed funds, with almost $6 million on an annual basis. This is a great tribute to the research accomplishments of our faculty under the increasingly competitive conditions of peer review at the national level. Our experience in national and international collaborative research will be most valuable as strategic alliances among geographically distributed sites, each with its own unique strengths, becomes the norm for a new internet-based system of doing science. Likewise, we must be alert to the educational opportunities afforded by disseminating not only our research but also our instructional efforts via multimedia and electronic publishing. Hopefully, this LCSR/DCS Explorer Magazine, which will be made available online on WWW should be a first move in this direction.
Thanks to some prompting by Maryann Holtsclaw - who volunteered to act as "gatherer" and publisher - I'm happy to see this first issue get off the drawing board. We imagine a triannual schedule, with regular entries from the department administrators (Chair, LCSR Director, Graduate Director), and items submitted by faculty about current projects, noteworthy achievements, etc. Please help Maryann when she puts out a call for articles for future editions.
We begin the '95 academic year with 3 new faculty in place (or almost in place): Sven Dickinson, Uli Kremer, and Suzanne Stevenson. Sven and Suzanne are concluding a year at RUCCS as Research Associates. Sven's office will be CoRE 310, and Suzanne will occupy CoRE 326. Uli Kremer is completing his PhD at Rice, and will join us in October for a month or so, then spend about 1.5 months at the European Parallel Computing Center (Polytechnic University of Catalonia) in Barcelona. In October, he'll use Bill Steiger's office (while Bill is at U. Catalonia, by the way), and Alex Borgida's office in the Spring (while Alex is on sabbatical).
These personnel additions give us a total of 36 tenure/tenure-track faculty, the largest we've ever been: 16 Professors, 11 Associate Professors (including newly promoted Haym Hirsh and Badrinath), and 9 Assistant Professors. We also have four LCSR Research Professors at various ranks.
And, we start this year with the highest level of research funding in our history: nearly $6 million/year in total cost, distributed over some 30+ grants. In fact, we have accomplished the major "imperative" of our 1992 External Review: to triple our research funding.
Though transfer registration is still ongoing, our Fall '95 enrollments look quite robust, certainly in our undergraduate program. (We won't see final graduate course enrollments until our new students have registered.) I'll have more data/detail in a few weeks.
This Fall, Haym Hirsh and Miles Murdocca will be on sabbatical. Alex Borgida, Kaz Kulikowski, and Naftaly Minsky are scheduled for Spring '96 sabbaticals. Bill Steiger will be away for the full academic year. Vasek Chvatal anticipates NSF SGER funding for Fall, which will allow him to be in Germany, as he was last year. Returning from sabbaticals/leaves are: Diane Souvaine, Endre Szemeredi, and Ann Yasuhara. Jerry Leichter left our department this summer.
Profs. Tomasz Imielinski and Miles Murdocca created a laboratory for networking research and instruction. The laboratory serves as the primary computing base for the upper division course Computer Science 442: Topics in Computer Science -- Internet Technology, and serves as a base for several graduate and undergraduate research projects involving wireless communication, distributed processing, and client-server interaction.
The laboratory is in Room 340 in the Computing, Research and Education (CoRE) building, on the Busch campus. The lab is equipped with seven multimedia Hewlett Packard (HP) workstations provided through an equipment grant from HP. The HP cluster is interconnected through an Ethernet link to a cluster of six '486 based PC's that are used for networking projects and for other projects that require modifications to the operating system. The HP cluster is also interconnected to two '486 based PC's that implement a radio network for wireless communication projects.
The HP cluster supports an electronic whiteboard, in which a common viewing area is simultaneously displayed on all seven systems. This is important for the instructional use of the facility, in which an instructor controls the common whit board from a server machine while students interact through their own copies of the whiteboard. In addition to the computing equipment, the laboratory is being upgraded for instructional use with new furniture, carpeting, and multimedia accessories. These items are being purchased through the support of FAS, LCSR, the Provost's office, and DCS faculty.
For more information on the instructional use of the laboratory, use a Web browser (like Netscape, Mosaic, or lynx) to open the URL: http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~murdocca/CS442/CS442.html. Professors Imielinski and Murdocca can be contacted via email at imielinski@cs.rutgers.edu and murdocca@cs.rutgers.edu, respectively.
Professor Tomasz Imielinski and B.R. Badrinath have received funding towards their "DataMan Project" from both ARPA and NSF. The total funding exceeds $2 million for a 3 year period starting September 1995 and is the combination of three awards. The ARPA award, "DataMan Project -- Information Services for Low Powered, Wireless Mobile Clients," has been funded for a three year period beginning September 24, 1995 for $1,637,254. Both NSF awards have been funded for three year periods, both beginning September 1, 1995. The first, "Designing Wireless Information Services," has been awarded $368,005. The second, "Designing Communication Support for Mobile Hosts in Distributed Systems," has received funding in the amount of $138,162.
The proposed work will create new technologies for bringing vital information to masses of people on the move. Requestors for information will be able to access all public domain information services located on the Internet (i.e. flight schedule information, traffic updates, etc.)
The rapidly expanding technology of cellular communications, wireless LAN, wireless data networks, and satellite services will give mobile users capability of accessing information anywhere and anytime. In the near future, tens of millions of users will carry a portable (palmtop, laptop) computer (often called personal digital assistant or PDA or personal communicator) which will have a wireless connection to a worldwide information network. The coming years will most likely be called the decade of mobile or nomadic computing.
The work on wireless information services, which accounts for client mobility, low energy and bandwidth, is only beginning to attract attention. Imielinski and Badrinath have been focusing on these issues for several years now. The design of wireless information services requires new research approaches, given the possiblity of wide area moves, frequent disconnection by the clients as well as energy and bandwidth limitations. Catering to such mobile and battery powered clients calls for fundamental changes to existing client server protocols. The planned work requires innovative, interdisciplinary solutions from database management, network communications, and distributed systems.
Technology transfer collaboration on this project will include Bellcore, GTE, Motorola, NCSA and Piscataway Township.
The proposed work will create new technologies for bringing vital information to masses of people on the move. Requestors for information will be able to access all public domain information services located on the Internet (i.e. flight schedule information, traffic updates, etc.)
Additional project information can be obtained through the Web. To open the URL http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~badri/ and/or http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~imielins/
A large benefit to the Computing Facility this year has been the availability of the State Equipment Leasing Fund(ELF). With these funds, we've been able to upgrade faculty and graduate workstations, purchase a compute server with HPCD, and have plans to upgrade the graduate fileservers and add a cluster of machines for computation.
The faculty computers consist of 3 general fileservers and several group-specific fileservers with around 35 workstations and 25 X-terminals in the offices. This year we are in the process of upgrading most of the faculty desktop machines with ELF funds. These include DECs (Alpha 3000/300LX), Suns (mostly SS5/85), Macintoshes and SGIs. For computational processing LCSR and HPCD have purchased a DEC Alpha 2100 3-processor machine with 1/2 Gigabytes of memory. We will be adding 8 smaller machines to this compute cluster later this year.
The graduate students have also received new desktop machines from ELF purchases. These new machines consist of DEC Alpha 3000/300LX's to replace or supplement existing machines in graduate offices or graduate public terminal rooms. This gives the graduate students better performance and machines with color monitors and audio. There is an additional Dec Alpha with extra memory and disk space that is being used as a fileserver. This machine supplements the 3 existing Sun fileservers. Within the next six months these 3 Sun fileservers will be upgraded with ELF funds.
The 2 undergraduate Sun fileservers are now 2-processor Sparc20/512's. These can be accessed via DCS or ICI student X-terminals.
Both the graduate and undergraduate machines have moved operating systems from Sun's Berkeley based SunOS to their AT&T SysV based Solaris2. One of the existing faculty fileservers has been converted; the rest to follow sometime later this year.
The network is in the process of being upgraded this year. Hill Center is being completely rewired to all the offices, replacing the old thicknet ethernet with twisted pair (10baseT). This work will be completed over the next couple of months. The CoRE Building machine room has also been converted from thick ethernet to 10baseT. In addition, there are two new Cisco Catalyst 5000 switches. These can handle 10 or 100 Mbps ethernet, FDDI and ATM. One of these switches is in Hill Center and the other in CoRE Building. This means that we can have 10 Mbps from each server in the machine room to the switch and will have clusters of 12 or more office machines sharing 10 Mbps to the switch in Hill Center. The bandwidth between the two buildings is now up to 400 Mbps. With these network changes we will also be able to handle newer, faster machines, multimedia, audio and the like.
The dialups were upgraded this year to include 10 new lines for a total of 45 dialups for DCS/LCSR faculty and students. The modems themselves have been upgraded from 9600 bps and 14.4 Kbps modems to 14.4 Kbps and 28.8 Kbps modems.
To obtain the postscript of the original newsletter, select here, or ftp to www.cs.rutgers.edu and get file dcs/LCSR_Explorer.v1n1.ps.