December 2005
Friends of the College of Engineering,
Over a long weekend in 1995, Pierre Omidyar created the initial version of what is now eBay. It is one of the many large-scale Internet services -- including Amazon, Google, Mapquest and Craigslist -- that have revolutionized our use of the Web. However, one cost of that revolution is that it now takes an eBay- or Google-sized company to turn a prototype or idea into a robust and reliable distributed service. The next Eric Brewer, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Pierre Omidyar, or Larry Page will have to build a substantial corporate apparatus that can invest in many trials and a lot of repeated work (plus the ensuing difficulties and failures) before they can truly realize their vision.
Here at Berkeley, a group of researchers led by Professors David Patterson and Randy Katz, are addressing this challenge in a truly revolutionary way. Their vision is to enable a single individual to invent and run the next revolutionary IT service, operationally expressing a new business idea as a multi-million-user service over the course of a ‘long weekend.’ This vision is being realized in a new center they call the RADLab, a laboratory to create core technology for robust, adaptive, distributed systems. Right now, it is a burgeoning partnership between the College of Engineering and Google, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems and falls under the CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) umbrella. You will be hearing more about this exciting new center in the weeks to come.
Last weekend we celebrated our fall graduating class. We now have more than 53,000 alumni around the world. Congratulations to all these new Berkeley Engineers and to the families and friends who have supported them in so many ways throughout their studies!
I wish you all the very best for the Holiday Season and look forward to another inspiring year in 2006.
Best wishes and Go Bears!
/rich
A. Richard Newton
Dean, College of Engineering and
the Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering
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