Planning Grant: I/UCRC for Configuration Analytics and Automation (CCAA)
1161015 University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC); Ehab Al-Shaer 1161009 George Mason University (GMU); Sushil Jajodia 1161044 University of California-Davis; Shyhtsun Wu
The University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC), George Mason University (GMU) and the University of California-Davis (UCD) are collaborating to establish the proposed center, with UNCC as the lead institution. The planning grant will permit these universities to coordinate, prepare and conduct meetings with potential industry members who have expressed interest in joining CCAA.
The goal of the proposed center is to build the critical mass of an inter-disciplinary academic researchers and industry partnership for addressing the current and future challenges of configuration analytics and automation to improve enterprise IT system and service manageability, performance, assurability, security and sustainability; and applying innovative analytics and automation to complex networked systems including: enterprise networking of clouds and data centers, hybrid and cyber-physical systems, smart critical infrastructures, mission-oriented networks (sensor-actuator networks), virtual overlays, social networks and mobile systems.
The proposed center will address the need of large Enterprises in the private sectors dealing with regulatory compliance requirements; government organizations; and IT product providers who have significant share of the market either in private sector or government and those niche products adopted by specific industries such as IT management systems, and emerging cloud services who are essential participants. The three participating universities have a strong record of industry collaboration and technology transfer. In addition, CCAA has a strong educational components that includes training undergraduate and graduate students, creating a new multi-disciplinary certificate on Configuration Analytics at UNCC, and involving minority and under-represented students through courses, seminars, workshops and research projects.
Configuration complexity imposes a heavy burden on both regular users and experienced administrators. This complexity dramatically reduces overall effectiveness of operational management and network assurability. Government agencies, critical infrastructure providers, large private or public enterprises, daily must deal with the complexity of managing the configuration of an entire array of products and services that make up their IT infrastructure. Thus, today’s and tomorrow’s complex network of information systems used by large enterprises can no longer be managed by disparate ‘handcrafted solutions’ and manual processes. Configuration analytics and automation techniques and tools must be developed and adopted to automate the entire IT configuration management cycle including defining, abstraction, synthesis, refinement, verification, validation, testing, debugging, optimization, tuning, and evaluation in order to verify, measure/assess and improve the system assurability (availability and QoS), security (trustworthiness), and sustainability (dependability) of current and future IT services and infrastructures. This planning grant from NSF will permit the Universities (University of North Carolina Charlotte, George Mason University and University of California Davis), which worked collaboratively on the formation of a multi-university NSF I/UCRC Center for Analytics and Automation (CCAA), to perform coordination, preparation and conducting meetings with potential industry members, who have expressed interest in joining CCAA. The emphasis of UCDavis has been configuration and analytics related to social informatics, i.e., information being exchanged via social media systems about our society.
