FIND Observer Panel Report April, 2009

offical copy, referred by local post

Area of growth — security — one of the lesson learned from the Internet is that security cannot be an add-on … not all the research efforts have placed security front and center.
network management Currently Internet management is characterized by a lack of information of network status and health, a deluge of data (at once voluminous, ambiguous, incomplete, and inconsistent), and blunt or imprecise actuators or control actions whose impact is hard to predict. Silent failures and hidden dependencies are common. … Tools that can be used include:
- declarative policy spec to assure correct behavior at massive scale
- statistical machine learning (… applied to program and computer architecture fault analysis) and massive automation based on recovery oriented computing (recovery through restart, reboot, re-image, return approaches)
creation of
- self-diagnosing protocols more fine-grained and informative data collection
- cross-layer event tracing or monitoring
privacy: with the combination of mobile devices, sensors, and ubiquitous communication in modern life, privacy concerns permeate the FIND work and thus mechanisms for preservation of privacy should be directly addressed in …
virtualization: while it has been a popular notion to virtualize physical resources there are side-effects to treating all physical resources as somehow equivalent. Specific physical parameters (bandwidth, memory, processor speeds, etc.) may have a dramatic impact on the performance of an ensemble of diverse virtual components. Research is needed to assesses how to characterize virtual resources to achieve optimal utilization while preserving the apparent equivalence of the virtual component.