An increasing number of those processors are able to communicate with each other via wired and wireless communications. Many of these processors are in embedded and real-time systems that need to be invisible to the people using them. Hardware platforms, software APIs, and communications protocols are evolving at a rate that requires frequent system upgrades. When system capabilities can change by a factor of 10,000 in a decade, even basic assumptions about how systems and networks are designed must evolve. This is especially true of self-organizing systems, where interactions among electronic agents and devices operating in different domains take place at high speed.
Problems can spread widely before any human being has been notified.
Systems and Networking research is also conducted both at our Cambridge, U.K. and Bay Area research labs. The system provides security, availability, and reliability by distributing multiple encrypted replicas of each file among symbiotically cooperating client machines. We are exploring ways of making transaction oriented network applications, like Internet telephony, reliable over a sometimes very unreliable network. The research includes work on how well the core Internet backbone handles failures, as well as how we can take advantage of knowledge about the underlying network protocols to make network applications more fault-tolerant. Please see our web page .