Future computing systems will be required to control a greater variety of computing, communication, storage, and external devices; to support a broader range of increasingly demanding applications; and to manage hundreds of asynchronous activities correctly, securely, and reliably. This cluster supports research and education activities that address these requirements in a variety of systems, including distributed, mobile, and embedded systems; sensing and control systems; dynamically configured, multiple-component systems; parallel systems; and trusted systems.

Areas of current interest include new ways to organize systems (e.g., peer to peer); software architectures that scale to handle thousands of components or a spectrum of heterogeneous components; ways to handle complex combinations of requirements, such as meeting real-time constraints and coordinating control in an embedded, failure-prone environment; methods that enable systems to detect problems and to take corrective action without human intervention; tools to analyze and predict the behavior of complete computing systems; compiler and runtime techniques for developing and controlling the execution of complex, dynamically changing applications; storage systems that are low-cost, scalable, and reliable; and operating systems and libraries for new technologies.