IUCRC Phase I Northeastern University: Center for Systems Innovation at Scale (i-Scale)

The Center for Systems Innovation at Scale (i-Scale) is an NSF-sponsored Industry University Collaborative Research Center (IUCRC) with sites at Northeastern University and Boston University, addressing the challenges of datacenter-scale computing. These large-scale shared systems are a pervasive part of today's computing landscape, and present unique opportunities for industry-relevant research. The i-Scale Center explores the challenges of these computing systems at large scale, across both software and hardware layers. It harnesses the computing demand of diverse sets of academic users to inform research and to provide paths for evaluation and translation into practice, via partnerships with the Mass Open Cloud Alliance (MOC-A) and the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). The Center further takes advantage of open-source licensing to facilitate collaboration between university researchers and industrial partners, allowing engineering and system-building on levels difficult to achieve within a university environment. As the scale of computing grows, so do the challenges facing academic researchers in computer systems, as it becomes increasingly difficult to observe real users, applications, and systems at scale. i-Scale collaborates with both industry partners and large-scale academic computing installations, which serve as unique instruments for computer systems research. i-Scale research focuses on all aspects of large-scale computing, with research thrusts at Northeastern including data storage systems, system software, hardware accelerators, security and privacy, compilers and runtime systems, energy-efficient and resilient computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing. i-Scale works to not only push the boundaries of data center and computing technology, but to transition this research into practice, in collaboration with its industry sponsors and the open source community. Through partnership with companies and open source projects operating at the cutting edge of large-scale computing, the Center trains and provides key experience to undergraduate and graduate students in developing industry-relevant technical skills, through both on-campus experience and the Northeastern co-op program, and provides input to coursework and curricula to keep teaching abreast of the latest developments in the field. Research projects supported by i-Scale will provide broad benefits from the development of new technologies for datacenter-scale systems, including private and hybrid clouds, that are a pervasive part of today’s computing landscape. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.