Mission
Large-scale systems, often in the form of cloud computing and data centers, are a pervasive part of the computing landscape today, and present unique opportunities for industry-relevant research. i-Scale aims to address these challenges via partnerships with the Mass Open Cloud and Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing center, providing access to systems running at data center scales. i-Scale works to not only push the boundaries of data center and computing technology, but to bring these results to industry, improving the competitiveness of its sponsors. In addition it trains and provides key experience to graduate and undergraduate students to develop industry-relevant technical skills.
Areas of Research
The Center for Systems Innovation at Scale (i-Scale) seeks to address novel challenges arising from computing at datacenter scale, with research focusing on the following themes:
- Scaling the software stack, including:
- Data storage systems
- Scalable OS and system software
- Programming models/compilers/runtimes
- New computing models (IoT, edge)
- New hardware technologies for the datacenter, including:
- Hardware acceleration (FPGAs),
- Emerging computing and memory technologies;
- Implications of computing at large scale, such as:
- Infrastructure and facilities management,
- Energy efficiency, economics, and
- Security and privacy.
We are particularly interested in research which either applies AI and/or machine learning to systems, or seeks to develop systems better adapted to emerging AI workloads.
