Ultra-Large-Scale Systems The Software Challenge of the Future

Ultra-Large-Scale Systems  

The Software Challenge of the Future

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Executive Summary

We propose a ULS systems research agenda for an interdisciplinary portfolio of research in at least the following areas:

• Human Interaction: involves anthropologists, sociologists, and social scientists conducting detailed socio-technical analyses of user interactions in the field, with the goal of understanding how to construct and evolve such socio-technical systems effectively.

• Computational Emergence: explores the use of methods and tools based on economics and game theory (e.g., mechanism design) to ensure globally optimal ULS system behavior and explores metaheuristics and digital evolution to augment the cognitive limits of human designers.

• Design: broadens the traditional technology-centric definition of design to include people and organizations; social, cognitive, and economic considerations; and design structures such as design rules and government policies.

• Computational Engineering: focuses on evolving the expressiveness of representations to accommodate the semantic diversity of many languages and focuses on providing automated support for computing the evolving behavior of components and their compositions.

• Adaptive System Infrastructure: investigates integrated development environments and runtime platforms that will support the decentralized nature of ULS systems as well as technologies, methods, and theories that will enable ULS systems to be developed in their deployment environments.

• Adaptable and Predictable System Quality: focuses on how to maintain quality in a ULS system in the face of continuous change, ongoing failures, and attacks and focuses on how to identify, predict, and control new indicators of system health (akin to the U. S. gross domestic product)that are needed because of the scale of ULS systems.

• Policy, Acquisition, and Management: focuses on transforming acquisition policies and processes to accommodate the rapid and continuous evolution of ULS systems by treating suppliers and supply chains as intrinsic and essential components of a ULS system.

The proposed research does not supplant current, important software research but rather significantly expands its horizons. Moreover, because we arefocused on systems of the future, we have purposely avoided couching our descriptions in terms of today’s technology. The envisioned outcome of the proposed research is a spectrum of technologies and methods for developing these systems of the future, with national-security, economic, and societal benefits that extend far beyond ULS systems themselves.

Though our research agenda does not prescribe a single, definitive road map,we offer three structures that suggest ways to cluster and prioritize groups o fresearch areas mapping the research areas and topics to (1) specific DoD missions and required capabilities, (2) DoD research funding types requiredto support them, and (3) estimates of the relative starting points of the research. These structures can then be used to define one or more roadmapsthat could lead to one or more ULS systems research programs or projects.

As a first step, we recommend the funding and establishment of a ULS System Research Startup Initiative, which over the course of the next two years would, among other things,

• work with others to conduct new basic research in key areas;

• foster the growth of a community of informed stakeholders and researchers; and

• formulate and issue an initial Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to attract researchers with proven expertise in the diverse set of disciplines(e.g., software engineering, economics, human factors, cognitive psychology, sociology, systems engineering, and business policy) that are collectively required to meet the challenge of ULS systems.

The United States needs a program that will fund the software research required to sustain ongoing transformations in national defense and achieve the DoD goal of information dominance. The key challenge is the decision to move forward. The ULS System Research Agenda presented in this report provides the starting point for the path ahead.