Berkeley RAD Lab: Center Organization

1
Berkeley RAD LabCenter Organization

• Armando Fox, Randy Katz, Michael Jordan, Dave
  Patterson, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica
• January 2006

2
RAD Lab Interdisciplinary Center for Reliable,
Adaptive, Distributed Systems

• Working with different industries on long-range,
  pre-competitive technology
• Training of dozens of future leaders of IT, plus
  their recruitment
• Working with researchers with track records of
  successful technology transfer

3
RAD Lab Opportunity New Research Model

• Chance to Partner with the Top University in
  Computer Systems on the Next Great Thing
• National Academy of Engineering mentions Berkeley
  in 7 of 19 1B industries that came from IT
  research
• NAE mentions Berkeley 7 times, Stanford 5 Times,
  MIT 5, CMU 3 Timesharing (SDS 940), Client-Server
  Computing (BSD Unix), Graphics, Entertainment,
  Internet, LANs, Workstations, GUI, VLSI Design
  (Spice) ECAD 5B?/yr , RISC 10B?/yr ,
  Relational DB (Ingres/Postgres) RDB 15B?/yr,
  Parallel DB, Data Mining, Parallel Computing,
  RAID 15B?/yr , Portable Communication (BWRC),
  WWW, Speech Recognition, Broadband
• Berkeley one of the top suppliers of systems
  students to industry and academia
• US News World Report ranking of CS Systems
  universities 1 Berkeley, 2 CMU, 2 MIT, 4 Stanford

4
Founding the RAD Lab

• 2.5-3M/yr 65 industry, 25 state, 10 fed
• 30 grad students 10 undergrads 6 faculty 2
  staff
• Looked for 3 to 4 founding companies to fund 5
  years _at_ cost of 0.5M / year (cash)
• Google, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems signed up
• Founding Company Model
• Prefer founding partner technology in prototypes
• Designate employees to act as consultants
• Many from company attend retreats, advise on
  directions
• Head start for participants on research results
• Putting IP in Public Domain so partners use but
  not sued
• 3-year project review by founding partners

5
RAD Lab

• Affiliate Company Model
• 100k for big companies, at least 50k in cash
• E.g., HP, Intel, IBM, Verizon (other
  suggestions?)
• 50k (cash) for small companies
• E.g., Amazon, Verisign (other suggestions?)
• Some attend retreats, advise on directions
• Head start for participants on research results
• Putting IP in Public Domain so partners use but
  not sued
• State Support via UC matching programs
• MICRO 0.5M/yr from industry, UC match rate
  1.6X, donation
• UC Discovery 2M/yr from industry, UC match
  rate 1.3X, grant, 1 proposal for 4 years vs.
  year-at-time like MICRO
• Fed Support
• Current NSF Grant for 3 years, 0.3M/year (Fox,
  Jordan, Patterson)

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What should be different?

• Try new ideas after 20 years of retreats big
  research projects (before 80 fed/10 state/10
  industry)
• Retreat attendance in future tied to support
• For people at founding or affiliate companies
• Or 1-time invitation to groom future founding or
  affiliate companies
• Special arrangements for very interesting, very
  small companies
• New Idea Dinner/Breakfast tables as Birds of a
  Feather
• Possible New Idea 1-day Workshop/Tutorial for
  Founding Companies
• Google More talks on Machine Learning to
  Diagnose, Debug Systems
• 1-day at Berkeley for 3 founding companies? (Be
  frank at Berkeley?)
• 1-day at founding companies? (Be worth extra
  effort on our part?)
• Fix retreat dates early to try to increase
  attendance

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Fix retreat dates early

• Summer 2006 Santa Cruz 3 dates conflicts?
• Wed-Fri May 31 to June 2(Memorial Day Monday May
  29)
• Mon-Wed June 5 to 7, 2006
• Wed-Fri June 7 to 9, 2006
• Winter 2007 Lake Tahoe 1/3-1/5/07 be OK?
• Well book 1/9/08-1/11/08 now

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Backup Slides
9
Sustaining Innovation/Training Engine in 21st
Century

• Replicate research centers based primarily on
  industrial funding to expand IT market and to
  train next generation of IT leaders
• Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) 50
  grad students, 30 undergrads _at_ 5M per year
• Stanford Network Research Center (SNRC) 50 Grad
  students _at_ 5M per year
• MIT Tparty 4M per year (100 from Quanta)
• Industry largely funds
• N companies, where N is 5?
• Exciting, long term technical vision
• Demonstrated by prototype(s)

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Tentative RAD Lab Timeline

• 2005 Launch RAD Lab 12/15/2005
• 2006 Collect workloads, Internet in a Box
• 2007 SLT/CT distributed architectures, Iboxes,
  annotative layer, class testing
• 2008 Development toolkit 1.0, tuple space, class
  testing Mid Project Review
• 2009 RAD Lab software suite 1.0, class test
• 2010 2.0 Software version, dissertations
• 2011 End of Project Workshop, Celebration

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State of Research Funding Today

• Most industry research shorter term
• DARPA exiting long-term (exp.) IT research
• 03-05 BAAs IPTO 9 AI, 2 classified, 1 SW
  radio, 1 sensor net, 1 reliability, all have 12
  to 18 month go/no go milestones
• Academic led funding reduced 50 (so far) 2001 to
  2004
• Faculty consultants in consortia led by defense
  contractor, get grants support 1-2 students (
  NSF funding level)
• NSF swamped with proposals, conservative
• 2000 to 6500 proposals in 5 years
• IT has lowest acceptance rate at NSF (between 8
  to 16)
• Ambitious proposal is a negative review
• Even if get NSF funding, proposal reduced to
  stretch NSF e.g., got 3 x 1/3 faculty, 6 grad
  students, 0 staff, 3 years
• (To learn more, see www.cra.org/research)