NSF Grant to fund Center for Autonomic Computing

August 26, 2010

A National Science Foundation grant will help fund a project to engage Mississippi State faculty members and industrial partners in research to accelerate autonomic computing knowledge creation and technology transfer. The land-grant institution is in the process of becoming the fourth member of the NSF's Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC), a national consortium working to develop computer systems with self-management capabilities designed to mitigate the growing complexity of devices and networks.

Mississippi State will join the University of Florida, the University of Arizona and Rutgers University in the NSF CAC initiative, which started in 2008.

Dr. Ioana Banicescu and Dr. Sherif Abdelwahed will coordinate all activities connected with this award through the Center for Computational Sciences, a member of the university's High Performance Computing Collaboratory. The prospective activities aim towards the development of model-driven frameworks, based on model-based or model-free approaches, for autonomic computing systems and applications.

According to Ioana Banicescu, a professor of computer science and principal investigator for the grant, research at the MSU CAC will focus on applications and systems that are able to run themselves in dynamic and changing operating environments.

"In autonomic computing, the technology being used adapts to available resources and workloads, and it anticipates user needs," Banicescu said. "Developing smarter autonomic computing solutions can reduce the costs of operating large-scale, self-managing systems, and also enhance the reliability and efficiency of applications running on or the services hosted on these systems."

Developing partnerships between the MSU center and the private sector and public agencies is a priority for Banicescu.

"We are very excited about the possibilities that MSU's center will give our students and faculty, as well as the opportunities for business and government to participate. The academic and economic development potential is significant," she explained.

For more information about the CAC at MSU, please contact Dr. Banicescu at ioana@cse.msstate.edu.