An increasingly popular target platform for many programming environments is clusters of workstations. Traditionally, resources on such systems are managed by operating system code. However, over the past few years, there has been sufficient evidence to indicate that efficient utilization of key resources, such as the network and the secondary storage, cannot be obtained through application-independent operating system code. Yale's research along this line is to explore alternative strategies to resource management whereby the compiler and the operating system share the responsibility.
Database systems provide an environment for storage and retrieval of both structured and semi-structured data. Such systems were originally designed for use in business-type applications. Today, however, they are being utilized in many other application domains, including scientific computing, networking, bioinformatics, etc. Research topics at Yale include transaction management, real-time systems, high-performance databases, multimedia systems, approximate queries, and data mining.
Data networks allow computers to communicate with one another, and of course form the backbone of the Internet. Networks are becoming increasingly complex as the needs for speed, bandwidth, robustness, and security increase. At Yale, research on computer networking focuses on the problem of congestion in large networks as well as the network management issues. Much like congestion on real highways, network congestion can be avoided by re-routing data through less congested portions of a network. But to do so requires designing networks that are more intelligent than conventional telephone switches, for example. This research is especially important in emerging multimedia applications as well as wireless and mobile networks. Research on network management at Yale concentrates on the design and development of a new software system that can automatically discover the topology of Internet Protocol (IP) networks, their elements, and physical interconnections among them. Detailed knowledge of network elements and their relationship with one another is crucial for efficient network management tasks like fault isolation and root-cause analysis.
Faculty members in the Computer Systems and Networking area are Daniel Abadi, Yiorgos Makris (EE), Andreas Savvides (EE), Avi Silberschatz, and Yang Richard Yang.