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November 24, 2006 Vol. 77,
no. 14F
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| RIBBON-CUTTING: Chancellor Robert Birgeneau prepares to cut the ribbon at the opening of Berkeley’s RAD Lab. AARON WALBURG PHOTO
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RAD Lab opens to great expectations
New research center builds tools for next-generation
Internet services
On Thursday, November 9, the RAD (Reliable, Adaptive
and Distributed systems) Lab opened in Soda Hall to great flourish.
Representatives from underwriters Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems
cut the ribbon with Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and founding EECS faculty,
as well-wishers packed the lab’s halls and toasted its success.
A year in the making and located on the fourth floor of Soda Hall,
the lab will “help the next generation of Internet services scale
up to a large size without the need for a large development organization,” said
EECS professor and lab founder David Patterson in his welcoming remarks.
The lab will largely be funded by a $7.5 million pledge over five years
from Google, Microsoft and Sun, and any software that emerges will
be made available to the public. Patterson, EECS professors Randy Katz,
Scott Shenker, Anthony Joseph and Ion Stoica, EECS/statistics professor
Michael Jordan and Berkeley associate scientist Armando Fox (Ph.D.’98
EECS) will lead the research.
EECS Ph.D. student Michael Armbrust works in the lab on DRAPE, or Dynamic
Resource Allocation for Power Efficiency. Using powerful algorithms,
Armbrust and his fellow researchers are teaching machines to intelligently
turn themselves on and off and move applications around to better manage
power consumption.
Armbrust said he’s excited to work in the brand-new space, whose
open design aims to facilitate collaboration. There are no dedicated
workspaces for faculty or students, only open cubicles for docking
laptops, and whiteboards fill almost every inch of wall space. At the
open house, many were already filled with calculations.
“We only expect great things to come out of this experiment,” said
Birgeneau.
Learn more at http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/wiki/RAD_Lab.
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