Building a New Community: Modelling, Visualisation and Verification of Large Scale Systems

At Queen Mary University of London the team of investigators are all engaged in researching solutions to many of the problems that arise from large scale systems. These include:- Network engineering for the global-scale communications networks that support the Internet. The sheer size and complexity of the Internet's underlying networks create a host of new problems for engineers and computer scientists. Examples include the correct use of network simulators and the accurate measurement of end-to-end performance across global-scale networks in order to provide customer guarantees. - Fluid mechanics of large-scale physical systems, e.g. aircraft bodies. Engineers study the generation of sound created by turbulent flow adjacent to a solid surface, which create some of the interior noise experienced by passengers in moving vehicles, particularly in aircraft and submarines. Experimental measurements of these flows typically produce thousands of data streams requiring intensive processing to reveal the underlying modes of activity and the evolution of flow patterns. - Software systems with millions of lines of code, e.g. the operating systems of Windows, Linux or Internet Explorer. Most people have experienced the frustration of finding 'bugs' in their computer applications. As the number of lines of codes required to create these applications grows and grows these challenges get ever harder. - Next generation computers inspired by biological systems of immense size and complexity. The more you look at nature the more obvious it is that natural systems have already solved many of the problems that are faced by computer scientists. An example is the human eye-brain system, which can be viewed as a biological computer system of enormous size and complexity. In all of these research areas, because of the huge underlying system state-space and variability, researchers are faced with three key challenges: how to validate their network models, how to know that the results of any single system-wide experiment can be reproduced by other researchers and how to best visualise the systems under study. To create a truly interdisciplinary approach to these issues, engineers, electronic engineers and computer scientists are joined by researchers from the school of Mathematical Sciences, bringing expertise in the mathematics of large-scale nonlinear systems, and the optimal design of experiments. The purpose of this project is to facilitate new multidisciplinary interactions addressing these problems, by bringing together different perspectives through a range of project events. Our programme of events is aimed at overcoming discipline boundaries, allowing us, and our colleagues, to think through the possibilities, resulting in new multidisciplinary research project proposals to EPSREC. We intend to begin by basing our thinking on the fact that, while each research group uses techniques specific to their field, the underlying scientific questions remain largely the same (how to model, verify and visualise). Our approach to these challenges is to direct attention at specific areas, including: - Reproducibility of large-scale system experiments- User response to quality of large-scale engineered systems - Visualisation of system behaviour - Techniques for multi-scale model abstraction