[Tccc] COMBINE: COmputational Modeling of BIg NEtworks (DOE Workshop)

Constantine Dovrolis dovrolis
Thu May 3 11:34:57 EDT 2012


(just a reminder: the abstract submission due date is May 15)


The US Department of Energy (DOE), in conjunction with academic
researchers, is organizing an exploratory workshop on COmputational
Modeling of BIg NEtworks* (COMBINE). The purpose of this workshop is to
investigate the major challenges and potential impact of a dedicated
research program in this area. It will take place on September 11-12,
2012, in Washington DC.

To participate, submit  an extended abstract that either summarizes
your prior relevant work in the area of large-scale computational
modeling and analysis of networks or describes novel ideas, approaches
or applications in this area.

          http://indico.fnal.gov/event/combine

Motivation and Scope:
---------------------
Most networking research is driven by the creation of artifacts such as
protocols, applications, middleware, routers and other network elements.
The Internet itself is one amazingly successful outcome of this
approach. Despite this success, we have come to realize that we only
partly understand how the Internet works. This is brought into sharp
focus when an underlying component of the Internet malfunctions or is
under attack.

If we were to look at the Internet in the same way that a biologist
looks at a living organism or a geophysicist looks at the climate
system, what would be the Internet research agenda?
How would we try to understand, monitor, and control the Internet,
considering the full extent of its complexity? Would our approach
change? Should it?


* Vertical understanding *
Networking research typically focuses on individual components or
layers of the overall Internet architecture. For example, if the focus
of a research project is on congestion control, there is typically
little or no consideration about how applications actually use the
network or how users react to congestion events. This is a direct
outcome of a reductionist stance in conducting a scientific
investigation. In reality, however, users, applications, and transport
protocols are all interdependent and it is precisely their interactions
that create much of the complexity in  determining end-to-end
performance.

By "vertical understanding" we refer to a research agenda that aims to
understand networks in a holistic manner, starting from the users and
applications, and socio-economic structures at the top all the way down
to effects that occur at the physical layer. Through a careful analysis
of this vertical path, we may be able to discover complex interactions
and important effects in network behavior and performance that we can
only suspect at this point.


* Horizontal understanding *
A typical end-to-end Internet path today is highly heterogeneous in
terms of the infrastructure as well as the policy boundaries that it
traverses (think of the path between a mobile user carrying a smart
phone and downloading media-rich content from a set of different sites
served by different CDNs and data centers). Most models for Internet
performance are still based on simplistic models of individual queues,
small-scale simulation topologies, and interdomain routing topologies
that collapse an entire Autonomous System to a single node.

By "horizontal understanding" we refer to a research agenda that aims
to capture the diverse nature of end-to-end Internet paths, considering
both the technological heterogeneity along a path as well as the policy
and economic boundaries that are crossed by those paths.


* Large-scale computational modeling and analysis *
The two objectives of vertical and horizontal understanding will most
likely demand new research methods and tools. We suspect that existing
analytical tools or experimental approaches (such as testbeds) will not
be sufficient in capturing the vertical and horizontal complexity of
the Internet.

Instead, we believe that large-scale computational modeling, a powerful
research tool that has been largely unexplored by networking
researchers, may be the right approach to study these objectives. This
is motivated by other disciplines, such as climate science or physics,
that have been using supercomputers and large-scale computational
modeling for a long time with many successful results. What if we could
construct large-scale computational models that can capture what
happens to a computer network all the way from the transmission of
bits to the complex and multifaceted latest Internet applications? What
would be the major challenges and objectives of that research agenda?
This, then, is the focus of this workshop.



Abstract Submission Guidelines:
-------------------------------
Participation in the workshop requires the submission of an extended
abstract that either summarizes the authors' prior relevant work in the
area of large-scale network computational modeling/analysis or it
describes novel ideas, approaches or applications in this area.

Submitted abstracts must be in plain-text and they should not be longer
than 1500 words. The submitted abstracts will not be peer-reviewed, but
they will be used, based on their relevance and/or novelty, to
determine a maximum of about 30 invited participants. The invited
abstracts will be distributed informally at the workshop to facilitate
discussion, but they will not be formally published.

To submit an abstract, please use the following link:
      http://indico.fnal.gov/event/combine


Important dates (all in 2012):
------------------------------
- Extended Abstract Submission: May 15
- Invitation of Participants: June 15
- Workshop: September 11-12 in Washington DC (American Geophysical Union).


Organizers:
-----------
- k. Claffy, CAIDA
- David Clark, MIT
- Constantine Dovrolis, Georgia Tech  (Chair)
- John Heidemann, USC-ISI
- Richard Fujimoto, Georgia Tech
- Srinivisan Keshan, University of Waterloo
- Don Towsley, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
- Zhi-Li Zhang, University of Minnesota

For any additional information, please email combine2012 at cc.gatech.edu.





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