Design of reliable and efficient communication and computing systems: architecture, code design, and optimization

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Three important technological trends underlie the modern information economy: the emergence of ubiquitous broadband digital communications, great advances in our ability to extract useful and actionable information from enormous data sets, and the continued scaling of computational power according to Moore's Law. Motivated by current challenges in each of these areas, and drawing together insights and recent advances from across these areas, we will tackle three synergistic research projects. The first is in architectural understanding, the second in algorithmic design, the third in broader applications. The first project concerns how best to architect communication systems for streaming data. The wireless industry is forecasting the need for a 1000-fold increase in capacity over the next decade. But, while many applications of increasing importance involve real-time content delivery, the streaming nature of this data is ill-matched to the block-based designs of most communication systems. We will develop fundamental limits on the tradeoff between reliability and delay in these systems and will also develop the required coding approaches to achieve those limits. Our second project draws upon techniques of mathematical optimization to develop novel algorithms for decoding error-correcting codes. Our approach has the potential to resolve some long-standing issues of great industrial importance in error correction. In our final project we will investigate power-aware design and operation of large-scale computational systems. By combining knowledge of queuing and techniques of wireless routing with insight into circuits and computer architecture, we will develop new algorithms for task scheduling and power management in large-scale data centers.