National Science Foundation Expedition in Computing Program
Jason Cong, PhD. (Computer Science), Director; http://www.cdsc.ucla.edu
To meet ever-increasing computing needs and overcome power density limitations, the computing industry has entered the era of parallelization, with tens to hundreds of computing cores integrated into a single processor and hundreds to thousands of computing servers connected in warehouse-scale data centers. However, such highly parallel, general-purpose computing systems still face serious challenges in terms of performance, energy, heat dissipation, space, and cost. The Center for Domain-Specific Computing (CDSC) looks beyond parallelization and focuses on domain-specific customization as the next disruptive technology to bring orders-of-magnitude power-performance efficiency improvement to important application domains.
CDSC develops a general methodology for creating novel customizable architecture platforms and the associated compilation tools and runtime management environment to support domain-specific computing. The proposed domain-specific customizable computing platform includes a wide range of customizable computing elements, from heterogeneous fixed cores to coarse-grain customizable cores and fine-grain field-programmable circuit fabrics; customizable high-performance radio frequency interconnects; highly automated compilation tools and runtime management software systems for application development; and a general, reusable methodology for customizable computing applicable across different domains. By combining these critical capabilities, the goal is to deliver a supercomputer-in-a-box that is customized to a particular application domain to enable disruptive innovations in that domain. This approach is being demonstrated in several important application domains in healthcare.
The CDSC research is carried out as a collaborative effort between four universities: UCLA (lead institution), Rice University, UC Santa Barbara, and Ohio State University. The research team consists of a group of highly accomplished researchers with diversified backgrounds, including computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, medicine, and applied mathematics. CDSC offers many research opportunities for graduate students, and also provides summer research fellowship programs for high school and undergraduate students. The core funding for CDSC is provided by the National Science Foundation with a $10 million award from the 2009 Expedition in Computing Program. This program, established in 2008 by the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), provides the CISE research and education community with the opportunity to pursue ambitious, fundamental research agenda that promise to define the future of computing and information and to render great benefit to society.
National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center
Deborah Estrin, Ph.D. (Computer Science), Director; http://www.cens.ucla.edu
The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) is a major research enterprise focused on developing wireless sensing systems and applying this revolutionary technology to critical scientific and societal pursuits. In the same way that development of the Internet transformed our ability to communicate, the ever-decreasing size and cost of computing components sets the stage for detection, processing, and communication technology to be embedded throughout the physical world and, thereby, fostering a deeper understanding of the natural and built environment and, ultimately, enhancing our ability to design and control these complex systems.
By investigating fundamental properties of embedded networked sensing systems, developing new technologies, and exploring novel scientific and educational applications, CENS is a world leader in unleashing the tremendous potential these systems hold.
The center is a multidisciplinary collaboration among faculty, staff, and students from a wide spectrum of fields, including computer science, electrical engineering, civil and environmental engineering, biology, statistics, education and information sciences, urban planning, and theater, film, and television. CENS was established in 2002 as a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center and is a partnership of UCLA, UC Riverside, UC Merced, USC, and Caltech.
The center’s current research portfolio encompasses projects across nine technology and applications areas, examples of which include
Microelectronic Advanced Research Corporation Focus Center
Kang L. Wang, Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering), Director; Bruce S. Dunn, Ph.D. (Materials Science and Engineering), Co-Director; http://www.fena.org
Dramatic advances in nanotechnology, molecular electronics, and quantum computing are creating the potential for significant expansion of current semiconductor technologies. Researchers at UCLA make pioneering contributions to these fields through the Functional Engineered Nano Architectonics Focus Center (FENA) funded by the Semiconductor Research Association and the Department of Defense.
The term “architectonics” is derived from a Greek word meaning master builder—an apt description of the center’s researchers as they build a new generation of nano-scale materials, structures, and devices for the electronics industry.
The FENA team explores the challenges facing the semiconductor industry as the electronic devices and circuits that power today’s computers grow ever smaller. With more and more transistors and other components squeezed onto a single chip, manufacturers are rapidly approaching the physical limits posed by current chip-making processes. Researchers seek to resolve a number of issues related to post-CMOS technologies that allow them to extend semiconductor technology further into the realm of the nanoscale.
U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences
Vidvuds Ozolins, Ph.D. (Materials Science and Engineering), Director
The interdisciplinary Molecularly Engineered Energy Materials (MEEM) Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) was established in 2009 and brings together several faculty across the UCLA campus in close collaboration with scientists and faculty at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Eastern Washington University, the University of Kansas, and UC Berkeley.
MEEM has active research programs on organic solar cells, electrochemical supercapacitors, and materials for carbon capture. MEEM focuses on materials that are inherently inexpensive (such as polymers, oxides, and metal-organic frameworks), can be easily assembled from intelligently de-signed building blocks (molecules, nanoparticles, and polymers), and have the potential to deliver transformative economic benefits in comparison with current crystalline- and polycrystalline-based energy technologies.
A great deal of the center's research is aimed at understanding the basic science issues in energy-related materials phenomena. These advances will enable rational design, efficient synthesis, and effective deployment of novel materials for energy applications. As global energy demands continue, the center’s work will be essential in helping to make alternative and renewable energy a viable resource for the 21st century.
National Science Foundation Future Internet Architecture (FIA) Program
Lixia Zhang, Ph.D. (Computer Science), Principal Investigator; http://www.named-data.net
While the Internet has far exceeded expectations, it has also stretched initial assumptions, often creating tussles that challenge its underlying communication model. Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to IPs requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location. To carry the Internet into the future, a conceptually simple yet transformational architectural shift is required, from today’s focus on where—addresses and hosts, to what—the content that users and applications care about.
This project investigates a new Internet architecture called Named Data Networking (NDN). NDN capitalizes on strengths, and addresses weaknesses, of the Internet’s current host-based, point-to-point communication architecture in order to naturally accommodate emerging patterns of communication. By naming data instead of their location, NDN transforms data into a first-class entity. The current Internet secures the data container. NDN secures the contents, a design choice that de-couples trust in data from trust in hosts, enabling several radically scalable communication mechanisms such as automatic caching to optimize bandwidth. The project studies the technical challenges that must be addressed to validate NDN as a future Internet architecture: routing scalability, fast forwarding, trust models, network security, content protection and privacy, and fundamental communication theory. The project uses end-to-end testbed deployments, simulation, and theoretical analysis to evaluate the proposed architecture, and is developing specifications and prototype implementations of NDN protocols and applications.
Rajit Gadh, Ph.D. (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering), Director; http://smartgrid.ucla.edu
The UCLA Smart Grid Energy Research Center (SMERC) performs research, creates innovations, and, demonstrates advanced wireless/communications, Internet, and sense-and-control technologies to enable the development of the next generation of the electric utility grid—the Smart Grid. SMERC also provides thought leadership through partnership between utilities, renewable energy companies, technology providers, electric vehicle and electric appliance manufacturers, DOE research labs, and universities, so as to collectively work on vision, planning, and execution towards a grid of the future. The Smart Grid of the future would allow integration of renewable energy sources, reduce losses, improve efficiencies, increase grid flexibility, reduce power outages, allow for competitive electricity pricing, allow for integration of electric vehicles, and overall become more responsive to market, consumer, and societal needs. SMERC is currently working on the topics of automated demand response, electric vehicle integration (G2V and V2G), microgrids, distributed renewable integration, storage integration into microgrids, cybsersecurity, and consumer behavior.
A Nanoelectronics Research Initiative National Institute of Excellence
Kang L. Wang, Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering), Director; http://win-nano.org
The Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN), one of the world’s largest joint research programs focusing on spintronics, brings together nearly 30 eminent researchers to explore critically-needed innovations in semiconductor technology.
A National Institute of Excellence, WIN leverages what are considered the best interdisciplinary nanoelectronics talents in the world to explore and develop advanced research devices, circuits, and nanosystems with performance beyond conventional CMOS devices. The pioneering new technology of spintronics relies on the spin of an electron to carry information, and holds promise in minimizing power consumption for next-generation electronics.
As rapid progress in the miniaturization of semiconductor electronic devices leads toward chip features smaller than 100 nanometers in size, researchers have had to begin exploring new ways to make electronics more efficient. Today’s devices, based on CMOS standards, cannot get much smaller and still function effectively.
Information-processing technology has so far relied on charge-based devices, ranging from vacuum tubes to million-transistor microchips. Conventional electronic devices simply move these electric charges around, ignoring the spin on each electron. Spintronics aims to put that extra spin action to work—effectively corralling electrons into one smooth chain of motion.
Bruce Dobkin, M.D. (Medicine/Neurology), William Kaiser, Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering), Majid Sarrafzadeh, Ph.D. (Computer Science), Co-Directors; http://www.wirelesshealth.ucla.edu
Advances in engineering and computer science are enabling the design of powerful home and mobile technologies that can augment functional independence and daily activities of people with physical impairments, disabilities, chronic diseases, and the accumulative impairments associated with aging. These home-health and mobile-health technologies can serve as monitoring devices of health and activity, feedback reinforcement for risk factor management, and outcome measures for individual care and large clinical trials.
The Wireless Health Institute believes that tiny sensors—including accelerometers, gyroscopes, force transducers, and visual and sound recorders worn on the body and in clothing—will become essential components for the delivery of health care and health maintenance. Sensors created by micro- and nano-technologies will simplify communications with health providers seamlessly over Internet and WIFI transmission using telephones and other convenient devices. To pursue these applications, our collaboration includes the highly ranked UCLA schools of Medicine, Nursing, Engineering and Applied Science, and Management, the Clinical Translational Science Institute for medical research, the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, and faculty from many departments on campus.