TITAN: A Next-Generation Infrastructure for Integrating Computing and Communication

The Computer Science faculty at the University of California at Berkeley is developing as its computing and communication infrastructure a new type of computing system, called Titan. This computing system comprises an integrated ensemble of computing and communication elements, organized to provide the user with a number of services that we think will characterize the practice of computing into the next century. The most important of these are (i) multimedia (especially video) capabilities in delivery vehicles, storage and communication, (ii) huge computing power (especially from clusters of workstations operating as a single parallel computer) and enormous storage space, (iii) innovative parallel languages, debuggers, and libraries, and (iv) high accessibility from mobile as well as fixed locations.

• Progress Report 1998-99 Draft
• Progress Report 1997-98
• Progress Report 1996-97
• Progress Report 1995-96
• Progress Report 1994-95
• Project Presentation 1995 NSF IIG PI Meeting, Duke University, June 1995.

Primary Components of the Project

• Core Computing Component
• NOW forms the architecture and operating systems portion of the core computing component of Titan.
• Castle forms the parallel programming and compilation portion of the Core.
• Media Component
• Driving Applications
• General CS Research Infrastructure

NOW: Architecture and OS for a Network of Workstations

Areas of Research within the NOW Component

• Active Messages: Fast Communication Primitives (Culler)
• Fast implementations of conventional communication layers. Fast Sockets and MPI. (Culler,Anderson)
• GLUnix: Global management of resources. (Anderson)
• xFS: a distributed file system using striping across workstation disks and co-operative caching in client memories.(Anderson, Patterson)
• Network Virtual Memory.(Patterson,Anderson,Culler)
• The NOW Benchmark Suite(Patterson)

Castle: Core parallel programming and language support

Areas of Research within the Castle component

• Split-C: A performance programming language for NOWs and parallel machines. Include Mantis graphical debugger. (Culler,Yelick)
• Multipol a library of distributed data structures, designed to ease the programming of "irregular" problems on large scale, distributed-memory multiprocessors. (Yelick)
• ScaLAPACK: Scalable version of the Titanium: compiler and language support for parallel programming of distributed memory multiprocessors(Aiken,Yelick,Graham)
• pSather is a parallel version of the object oriented language Sather.(Feldman)

MultiMedia Systems Support and Content Development

Areas of Research within the Multimedia component

• Tenet Protocols for real-time applications.(Ferrari)
• Plateau Multimedia Research Group: continuous media applications and systems infrastructure. (Rowe)
• Multimedia Authoring Initiative (Harrison)
• Ensemble: Language- and Document- centric Interactive Systems (Graham and Harrison)
• Computer Graphics (Sequin, Barsky, Forsyth, Canny, Malik)
• Info pad:prototype for providing ubiquitous, wireless access to multimedia data. (Broderson, Brewer, Katz, Messerschmitt, Rowe)
• The Daedalus/Icarus Project:wireless networking strategies. (Katz)
• Connection to BagNet

Driving Applications

• Global Climate Modeling: GATOR (Demmel)
• Soda Hall Building Walkthrough (Sequin)
• The SmartPath Simulation and Animation Package , part of the Path Project (Varaiya, Yelick)
• BAT (Bayesian Automated Taxi): Autonomous Vehicle Control , part of the Path Project (Russell)
• Cancer Cell Simulation (Yelick, Demmel)
• Digital Repositories: intelligent access to massive quantities of multimedia information in distributed repositories (Wilensky, Stonebraker)
• CS Technical Report Server and Electronic Environmental Library Project
• NASA EOSDIS Alternative Architecture Project.
• OPtometric Topography Involving the Cornea And Lens (Barsky)
• Database (Stonebraker)
• Scalable Web Services (Brewer)

General CS Research Infrastructure

• SoftWare Warehouse