By Beth Miller
Raj Jain, PhD, professor of computer science & engineering, has received a grant in collaboration with Qatar University to study application delivery in cloud-based application deployment environments.
The three-year, $1.05 million grant provides $315,000 for Jain’s work in collaboration with Mohammed Samaka, PhD, associate professor of computer science at Qatar University, who is the lead principal investigator. Jain will co-manage a postdoctoral researcher in Qatar and a graduate student at WUSTL.
Their research will focus on the separate middlebox infrastructure that provides application delivery services such as security, performance and scaling in modern enterprise and Internet-based application environments. There is no clear support for middleboxes in the original Internet design, so datacenter administrators must accommodate middleboxes through ad-hoc and error-prone network configuration techniques.
The researchers suggest that most businesses need to use a globally distributed application-level routing infrastructure to intelligently route application traffic to the right cloud data center. For example, Google and Microsoft have their own worldwide network for their traffic. But since such an infrastructure would be extremely hard to own and manage, it is best to design a shared solution where application-level routing could be provided as a service by a third-party global provider, such as an Internet service provider.
The grant was part of a total of $121 million awarded last year by Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) under its flagship funding program, the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP). Twenty-seven research institutions in Qatar received funding for a total of 137 proposals, out of the 710 proposals submitted. Grants awarded were between $120,000 and $1.05 million, with a requirement that at least 65 percent of the annual budget is expended and 50 percent of the total research efforts be conducted in Qatar.