This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This research proposes a new network architecture, SCAFFOLD, that directly supports the need of wide-area services. SCAFFOLD treats service-level objects (rather than hosts) as first-class citizens and explores a tighter coupling between object-based naming and routing. A clean-slate, scalable version of the federated SCAFFOLD architecture is being designed and prototyped. System components include programmable routers/switches, resolution services for object-based lookup and forwarding, and integrated end-hosts.
The center of people's "digital lives" today are online services -- not the networks or computers on which they run. The research ultimately explores what abstractions and mechanisms that will make the future network a powerful, flexible hosting platform for wide-area services (the so-called ``cloud''). In doing so, SCAFFOLD would lower the barrier to deploying networked services that are scalable, reliable, secure, energy-efficient, and easy to manage.
The project includes a summer-camp outreach activity with schools serving under-represented groups to build services on top of SCAFFOLD, new special course development, and technology transfer with industry.
