This award supports cooperative research in computer systems to be conducted by Richard Muntz and Mario Gerla of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) together with Prof. Edmundo de Souza e Silva at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Prof. Roberto Boisson de Marca of the Catholic University, also in Rio. They will develop an environment for modeling and performance/reliability analysis of distributed computer communication systems. The goal is to give the analyst the ability to test new ideas, incoporate new techniques and build interfaces tailored to particular application areas. New solution methods will be developed to be incorporated into the environment. State-of-the-art solution techniques will be implemented as well. Analytic studies of distributed system problems will be performed using the new environment which will help guide its design in addition to having their own independent interest. The two universities in Rio are currently building a Laboratory for the Study of Distributed Systems. It will incorporate powerful work stations linked by a local area network. At UCLA a large project is underway to develop modeling environments. Theoretical modeling developed in the U.S. will show directions to be followed in Brazil in building tools to perform modeling and analysis so that this cooperative effort will combine the complementary work of two active and productive groups and be beneficial to both. Software development efforts will be carried out in both countries, libraries of objects and analytical solvers will be be built up and there are plans to advise Ph.D. students from both Brazil and the U.S.
