Nov
4
We’d like your help with a brainstorming exercise: Identify about a dozen game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years. Here’s what we mean:
- The advance needs to be “game changing,” in the sense of dramatically altering how we think about computing and its applications.
- The importance of the advance needs to be obvious and easily appreciated by a wide audience.
- There needs to be a clear tie to computing research (or to infrastructure initiatives that build upon research and were sponsored by computing research organizations).
- We’re particularly interested in highlighting the impact of federally-funded university-based research.
We’re focusing on work carried out in the past 20 years or so, in part because of the upcoming 20-year celebrations for the CISE directorate at NSF. Of course, lots of great fundamental research can take more than 20 years before the impact becomes obvious, but even in such cases there is usually continuing influences on more recent research that can be cited here.
To get your juices flowing, here are four game-changers that we definitely think belong on the list. Use these to think about others that belong on the list, or feel free to argue with our choices.
The Internet and the World Wide Web as we know them today
In 1988 — 20 years ago — ARPANET became NSFNET. At the time, there were only about 50,000 hosts spread across only about 150 networks. In 1989, CNRI connected MCImail to the Internet — the first “commercial use.” In 1992, NCSA Mosaic triggered the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. In 1995, full commercialization of the Internet was achieved, with roughly 6,000,000 hosts spread across roughly 50,000 networks. Today, there are more than half a billion Internet hosts, and an estimated 1.5 billion Internet users.
While many of the underlying technologies (digital packet switching, ARPANET, TCP/IP) predate the 20-year window, the transition from the relatively closed ARPANET to the totally open Internet and World Wide Web as we know them today falls squarely within that window. NSF-supported contributions included CSnet, NSFNET, and NCSA Mosaic.
The Internet and the World Wide Web are game-changers.
Where once we filed, today we search
The vast majority of the world’s information is available online today, and we find what we need — whether across the continent or on our own personal computer — by searching, rather than by organizing the information for later retrieval.
Research on the retrieval of unstructured information is based on decades of fundamental research in both computer science theory and AI. But the paradigm shift that is web crawling and indexing and desktop search is much more recent. It traces its roots to university projects such as WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, Lycos, Excite, Inktomi, and the NSF Digital Libraries Initiative research which begat Google.
Search is a game-changer.
Cluster computing
At the risk of offending our many computer architect friends, we’re going to assert that cluster computing is the most significant advance in computer architecture in the past 20 years.
A decade ago, Jeff Bezos was featured in magazine advertisements for the DEC AlphaServer, because that’s what Amazon.com ran on — the biggest shared-memory multiprocessor that could be built. Similarly, the AltaVista search engine was designed to showcase the capabilities of big SMP’s with 64-bit addressing.
Today, this seems laughable. Companies such as Google and Amazon.com replicate and partition applications across clusters of tens of thousands of cheap commodity single-board computers, using a variety of software techniques to achieve reliability, availability, and scalability.
The notion of hardware “bricks” probably can be traced to Inktomi, a byproduct of the Berkeley Networks of Workstations project. The software techniques are drawn from several decades of research on distributed algorithms.
Cluster computing is a game-changer.
The transformation of science via computation
The traditional three legs of the scientific stool are theory, experimentation, and observation. In the past 20 years, computer simulation has joined these as a fundamental approach to science, driven largely by the NSF Supercomputer Centers and PACI programs. Entire branches of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and other fields have been transformed.
Today, a second transformation is underway — a transformation to data-centered eScience, which requires semi-automated discovery in enormous volumes of data using techniques such as data mining and machine learning, much of which is based on years of basic research in statistics, optimization theory, and algorithms.
Computational science is a game-changer.
Some non-inclusions
Quantum computing. There is huge potential here, but the impact hasn’t been felt yet.
Simultaneous multithreading. We claim that this, and many other important advances in computer architecture, are dominated by cluster computing. (Remember, we’re trying to be provocative here! Blame Dave Ditzel, who put this idea into Ed’s head.)
Your part goes here!
What’s your reaction to the four game-changers that we’ve identified? Do you agree that they belong on the list? If not, why not? If so, what do you think were the principal components of each — the key contributing research results?
Even more importantly, give us eight more! What are your nominees for game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years?
Give us your thoughts!
– Ed Lazowska and Peter Lee
Jul
25
The Computing Community Consortium was programmed as the closing plenary session at the 2008 CRA Conference at Snowbird — a once-every-two-years gathering of the heads of CRA’s member organizations.
Interest was strong — more than 125 department chairs and lab directors attended the 90-minute session, more than 3X as many as have stuck around for any previous final session at Snowbird. Ed Lazowska, Susan Graham, Richard Ladner, Randy Bryant, and Chip Elliott presented. All presentation materials are on the web here. A 20-minute Q&A session followed the presentations.
Several highlights for me:
- CCC’s “Data-Intensive Scalable Computing” initiative, led by Randy Bryant and Thomas Kwan, has really taken off: two new NSF programs, multiple workshops and conferences, significant educational penetration. There is a ton of opportunity here for our field — great computing research challenges, and great chances to partner with other fields that are transitioning from data-poor to data-rich. (There is a “new computational science” here whose breadth and impact will totally dwarf the breadth and impact of first-generation simulation-oriented computational science.)
- The theory community really has its act together — I’m excited at the prospect of the “nuggets” that will emerge from the recent workshop led by Richard Ladner and others.
- GENI is alive and well, although its shape has changed. GENI is no longer envisioned as necessarily being a single huge uber-instrument. Rather, a collection of research instrumentation needs are likely to emerge from this summer’s formulation of a broad Network Science and Engineering research agenda — needs that might, perhaps, be met by several focused instruments.The GENI Project Office is about to announce a number of awards to explore technologies for constructing such instruments; there have been major support commitments by the private sector, complementing those of NSF.
That’s the scoop. It’s a great time to be engaged in computing research!
– Ed Lazowska
Jul
14
CCC Web Site Design Snafu
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In the last few hours we’ve learned that the main CCC web site design, which was modeled on an issue of A List Apart, was used without appropriate permission. It was certainly never the intention of the CCC to violate copyright and we have taken immediate steps to discontinue use of the design. We’ve conveyed our apologies to Jeffery Zeldman, the original designer, and apologize for any disruption the site redesign may cause.