The past few years have seen the emergence of large-scale community-driven and peer-to-peer Internet applications and services exemplified by Skype, YouTube, wikis and other Web 2.0 applications. Many of these applications do not rely on centralized servers for their operations or central authorities for management, making trust and security essential to their proper operation and management. In addition, these applications are characterized by demand of large amount of computational, communication and storage resources that must be provided in a decentralized manner on a largely unreliable and untrusted network.
The goal of this project is to establish the Minnesota Emerging Networked Systems and Applications (MENSA) Research Infrastructure for advancing research on emerging Internet-scale, community-oriented, networked systems and applications at the University of Minnesota (UMN). This infrastructure supports the research of several PIs at UMN that are addressing the challenges of emerging applications at several levels: from the application to the network and system levels. The PIs bring a unique blend of expertise in networking and distributed systems, grid computing, cryptography and security, data mining and machine learning, and theory. Broader Impact: The MENSA facility also provides an ideal "hands-on'' learning environment for teaching students important data analysis, system building and experimental skills that are critical for today's IT workforce. In a broader social context, enabling the creation of emerging Internet-scale, user-driven, community-oriented, networked systems and applications, many of which are too futuristic to have yet been contemplated, will bring significant benefit to users and the society at large.
