U.S. - Pakistan International Planning Visit: Economical Computing Substrate for Developing Regions

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0940048 ButtDescription: This award is to support a planning visit by Dr. Ali Butt, Computer Science Department, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia. The foreign collaborator is Dr. Umar Saif at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. The PI will have in-person interactions with the foreign collaborators to evaluate the available resources, facilities and to interview prospective graduate researchers, and assess the feasibility of conducting the proposed research. The purpose is to finalize plans for a collaborative proposal to be submitted in response to NSF/CNS later in 2009. The foreign scientist, Dr. Umar Saif is a highly accomplished young scientist who has research experience at a prestigious US university. Saif?s research is on ubiquitous computing, operating and distributed systems, mobile systems, high-speed routing architectures and the impact of IT in developing world countries. These skills complement the PI?s expertise in developing robust economical resource-sharing systems, grid computing, and system-level optimizations for data-intensive computing. Intellectual Merit The increasing reliance on computers in our daily lives is driving the demand for easily accessible computing resources. Providing computational, storage, and network resources to sustain modern applications is a challenge, especially in under-privileged areas where economical constraints limit even basic computer services. The projected research aims to design an economical computing substrate that transparently harvests unused resources from well-provisioned setups to support applications of under-privileged users. Use of such a substrate can also be employed when acquisition of dedicated resources is not justified, e.g., academic experimentation. Broader Impact Research results from the proposed project will have a broad impact on wide-ranging computer use, as diverse as basic computing in under-privileged regions, academic experimentation, and mitigating resource wastage in enterprise computing. The collaboration will open new horizons for collaborative research, and will enable identification of specific research problems faced by users in developing.