CENTER MISSION AND RATIONALE

The overall mission of the CAC is to pursue fundamental research and development in cloud and autonomic computing methods and their application to a broad range of systems of interest to industry and government partners.

The scope of the CAC center broadly encompasses cloud computing systems and applications and the use of autonomic computing methods for the management of these and other IT systems.

CAC activities on cloud computing cut across several layers of IT systems, including: hardware platforms for computing, storage and networking; design of data centers that aggregate platforms to provide cloud services; systems software and distributed computing middleware providing programming interfaces and management primitives within and across multiple cloud data centers; applications that leverage the on-demand and scalable nature of cloud platforms; and cyber-security.

CAC activities on autonomic computing focus on methods, architectures and technologies for the design, implementation, integration and evaluation of computing systems and applications that are capable of achieving desired behaviors without the involvement of users or administrators.

At the intersection of cloud computing and autonomic computing, the center's activities aim to achieve self-management capabilities within and across the layers of cloud computing systems and applications in order to enable independent operation, minimize cost and risk, accommodate complexity and uncertainty, and enable systems of systems with large numbers of components.