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UC San Diego Researcher Selected for Third Straight HP Labs Award

San Diego, July 7, 2010  -- A computer scientist and director of the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) at the University of California, San Diego has been selected to participate in the prestigious HP Labs Innovation Research Program. The program is designed to provide colleges, universities and research institutes around the world with opportunities to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP. 

Amin Vahdat, selected for a 2010 HP Labs Innovation Research Award, addresses the January research review of UCSD's Center for Networked Systems, which he directs.

For the third year in a row, CNS director Amin Vahdat is a recipient of the award, which will allow him to continue to collaborate with HP Labs on a research initiative focused on a scalable, commodity data center network architecture. Most of the award will go to fund graduate students working with Vahdat on interconnecting commodity switches in a fat-tree architecture for clusters consisting of tens of thousands of nodes.

“Our group is targeting a way to deliver full bandwidth for large clusters once 10 GigE switches become commodity at the edge,” said Vahdat, who holds the SAIC Chair in Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering department of UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering. “The goal of our work is to enable scale-out networking, where additional bandwidth and ports can seamlessly be added to a data center on demand.”

A 2008 HP Labs Innovation Research award allowed Vahdat’s group to build a hardware-software prototype of a 36-PC scalable data center switch architecture. The 2009 award shifted the focus to building better scheduling algorithms for dynamically changing communication patterns in the data center.

UC San Diego is one of only 52 universities in the world to receive a 2010 Innovation Research award. HP reviewed more than 375 proposals from 202 universities across 36 countries.

The HP Labs Innovation Research Program is designed to encourage open collaboration between HP and the academic community on mutually beneficial, high-impact research. This year's proposals were solicited on a range of topics within the eight broad research themes at HP Labs – analytics, cloud, content transformation, digital commercial print, immersive interaction, information management, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability.

"Our goal with the HP Labs Innovation Research Program is to inspire the brightest minds from around the world to conduct high-impact scientific research, addressing the most important challenges and opportunities facing society in the next decade," said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs. "UC San Diego has demonstrated outstanding achievement and we look forward to collaborating with it in this dynamic area of research.”

HP is one of eight corporate members in the Center for Networked Systems, as well as an industry partner in the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), where CNS’s Vahdat is an academic participant. 

Media Contacts

Doug Ramsey, Calit2, +1-858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu, Daniel Kane, Jacobs School of Engineering, +1-858-534-3262, dbkane@ucsd.edu or Lacey Haines for HP Labs, +1 415-365-0482, lacey.haines@bitecommunications.com

Related Links

HP Labs Innovation Research Program
UCSD Center for Networked Systems
Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego
Calit2