Computer systems research at Yale is divided into three sub-areas (with a large degree of overlap and collaboration across these sub-areas): database systems, operating systems, and networking systems.
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, and bioinformatics. Research topics at Yale include transaction management, data warehousing, Web-scale databases, real-time systems, multimedia systems, approximate queries, and data mining.
The role of operating systems has evolved over time, from sharing one device's resources among many users in the mainframe era, to providing convenient user interface, storage, and networking abstractions in the personal computer era. As we transition to the ubiquitous computing era, operating systems must now manage a user's information and computation across many computers and devices. Yale is developing new operating system architectures, application environments, and security frameworks to meet today's challenges across the computing spectrum, from mobile personal devices to large-scale Internet services built on grids of many-core processors.
Computer networks allow computers to communicate with one another, and of course form the backbone of the Internet. But although they have become a critical infrastructure of our information-based society, they still have not achieved the reliability of traditional telephone networks. Research at Yale concentrates on designing highly robust and efficient Internet backbone networks, by combining computer science with optimization, economics, and game theory. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is emerging as a new paradigm for network application development, as witnessed by the wide usage of P2P file-sharing and video-streaming applications. However, these applications not only generate a large volume of traffic, but also may unnecessarily spread traffic across the whole Internet, leading to inefficiency. Research at Yale focuses on designing effective architecture and algorithms to improve both application performance and Internet operation efficiency.
Faculty members in the Computer Systems and Networking area are Daniel Abadi, Bryan Ford, Maxwell Krohn, Yiorgos Makris (EE), Andreas Savvides (EE), Avi Silberschatz, and Yang Richard Yang.