1. Berkeley RAD Lab Center Proposal
Armando Fox, Randy Katz, Michael Jordan, Dave Patterson, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica
RADS Retreat, June 2005

2. Setting the Context
Academic research trains next generation of IT leaders AND helps expand IT market
19 $1B+ industries from IT research (NAE)
Long-term, experimental research been key
Synergy of Industrial + Academic research
Academic gov’t (DARPA)/industry funded (>80% / <20%)
3-6 faculty, grad student, 2-3 staff, 4-5 yrs
Berkeley SW: Spice/Magic CAD programs, BSD (Berkeley SW Distribution) Unix op. sys., Ingres/Postgres Relational Databases, …
HW: RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), NOW (Networks of Workstations), …

3. Traditional Research Funding Today
Avg. industry research shorter term today
DARPA exiting long-term (exp.) IT research
’03-’05 BAAs: 9 AI, 2 classified, 1 SW radio, 1 sensornet, 1 reliability
Academic led funding reduced 50% in 3 years
Faculty ≈ consultants in consortia led by defense contractor, get grants ≈ support 1-2 students in return
NSF swamped with proposals, conservative
2000 to 6500 proposals in 5 years
IT has lowest acceptance rate at NSF (between 8% to 16%)
“Ambitious proposal” is a negative review
Even if get NSF funding, proposal reduced to stretch NSF $ e.g., “ServRADS” got 3 x ⅓ faculty, 6 grad students, 0 staff, 3 years
(To learn more, see

4. Sustaining Innovation Engine?
Replicate research centers based primarily on industrial funding to train next generation of IT leaders and expand IT market
Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC); 50 grad students
Stanford Network Research Center (SNRC); ?? Grad students
Exciting, long term technical vision
Demonstrated by prototype(s)
Industry largely funds, so industry helps set directions
N companies, where N ≥ 6
center proposes 1st draft of new standard
Multiple interfaces: Framework, OS, server, router, …

5. Existing Center Models: SNRC
Foundation Member* (
Industrial Executive Council √
Place a Researcher-in-Residence
CTO Roundtable/Forum
Technical Advisory Board
Initiate targeted Ph.D. student mentorship program
Industrial Review Committee
Annual Contribution
$250k*
$250k
$50k
Senior Member
Affiliate Partner
* Must also endow 1 Faculty Chair Grad Fellowships (1 X $1.5M + 2 x $0.3M)

6. Existing Center Models: BWRC
IP: put in public domain or offer no-fee, non-exclusive licenses
Participating Member*
(bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Background/Charter.htm)
Member, Board of Advisors √
1 Provisional Industrial Researcher (< 2 months, no UC IP agreement)
1 Visiting Industrial Fellow (≥ 2 months, sign UC IP agreement)
Attend 2 research reviews
Donations: Product, equipment or technology
Annual Grant Contribution
$150K†
$75K†
Associate Member
† BWRC gets ½ funding via MARCO center, funded 50% industry & 50% DoD
* P.M. who is also a CITRIS Founding Corporate Member called Platinum

7. Founding the RADLab; Start ≈ Jan ’06?
$2.5M / yr (≈½ BWRC) 80% industry, 20% gov’t
5 years: 25 grad students, 25 undergrads , 6 faculty, 2 staff
Looking for ≈ 3 founding companies to fund ≈ 3-5 cost of 2 employees / year + ≈ 3 founding companies to fund ≈ 3-5 cost of 1 employee / year
Follow Berkeley Wireless Research Center model
IP model, Board of Advisors, Participating/Associate Members, Industrial Fellow, Executive Director for day-to-day operations, …
+ Add good ideas from SNRC: Targeted Mentor, …
+ Your good ideas go here (Design review, brain storming, …?)
Got leads or advice? Contact one of us {fox, randy, jordan, pattrsn, shenker,
Candidate 2 employees/yr: Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun
Candidate 1 employees/yr: Amazon, Google, Oracle, Verisign, Yahoo; Telcordia? Tellme?
Gourmet by gourmet

8. Overarching Mantra
Enable a faster pace of network service innovation through new distributed system architectures that reduce operations cost by 2-3 orders of magnitude
The Challenge:
Software systems: Too much information  make sense of it through statistical learning & control theory
Network systems: Too little information  exploit better observation and monitoring in the network infrastructure to drive management processes
The Payoff:
Single person can write, profile, deploy, operate the next-generation IT business (“the Fortune 1 million”)
Do for Internet apps what Web did for individual publishing