Faculty from the Departments of Computer Science, Systems Engineering, and Electrical
Engineering are bringing together a diverse set of capabilities to impact the
development, modeling, and evaluation of information-based systems. These researchers
design and build innovative distributed systems; using these to build larger integrated
general-purpose or application-specific systems; and support the development of
appropriate software and information systems to analyze the performance of these
and other mainstream information-based systems.
VINTLab, the Virginia Internet
Engineering Laboratory, provides students with realistic, hands-on experience
with networking hardware and software. The goal of the VINTLab effort is to graduate
students who can maintain, update, improve and even redesign future incarnations
of the Internet.
Researchers have built a multicomputer, Centurion, that
is composed of over 400 commercial, off-the-shelf processors. Centurion is capable
of delivering 400 gigaflops peak performance.
Legion is a companion software
system that supports very large applications running on Centurion or on geographically
distributed, heterogeneous computers. Legion assures scalability, fault tolerance,
security and site autonomy.
The Departments of Computer Science and Electrical
Engineering established a jointly administered B.S. degree program in computer
engineering, which the state recently approved.
Faculty in several departments
explore solutions that will lead to more survivable information-intensive systems.
We develop techniques to manage risk, assure code safety, and to analyze infrastructures
and systems such as those for water, electric, railroad, transportation, law enforcement,
and other safety-critical infrastructures.
Sustaining intelligent human-computer
interactions require new techniques such as the ability to animate synthetic characters
in graphical environments, to use human gaze to guide what is processed and presented
to the user, and to render very large geometric datasets.
New services offer
through databases, multimedia networks, and ubiquitous embedded computers pose
fundamental engineering problems in the storage and retrieval of data, sustaining
service quality, and integration of computation into functional objects.
