The University of Arizona
NSF Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center @ UofA

Co-Director

- Salim Hariri, PhD, (520) 621-4378, [about]

- Ali Akoglu, PhD, (520) 626-5149,  [about]

Research Director

- Youssif Al-Nashif, PhD, (520) 621-9915

Business Manager

- Firas Barakat, MS, (520) 548-6325,

Affiliated Researchers

- David MacQuigg, PhD,    [about]

Graduate Students

Don P. Cox, Ph.D. Candiate

Last year, our team constructed the Critical Infrastructure Protection modeling & simulation Test Bed (CIPTB) focused on researching cyber security of industrial control systems and related Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems within our society's critical infrastructures. This year we focus on using the CIPTB to gain an understanding of cyber attack methodologies and to develop cyber defense technology.

Zhitao Li, M.S. student (CV) (personal web page)

I am currently working on power and performance management related research for large scale Data Centers and cloud computing. The goal of this research is to creating a large scale high performance computing system augmented with intelligence to manage and maintain itself under changing circumstances impacted by internal or external environment. My current work involves developing and implementing algorithms that detects the system's current workload and schedule hardware resources for the virtual machines that sit on top of the physical machines accordingly and automatically.

N V Krishna, M.S. student (CV) (personal web page)

My current research focus is on development of Autonomic Cyber Physical system which integrates scientific computational models with physical experimental setup to accelerate model development. I am developing software for adaptive sensing in physical experimental soilbed set up at Biosphere 2 to study the effects of hydrological cycles on Hill slopes. Our current model of logging data using Labview has been successful in running for few days till now while showing tolerance for network instabilities. I am currently developing interfaces for controlling experimentation as well as for streaming and processing data from experimental setup.

Shafiul "Jacky" Islam-(M.S.) since Fall 2010

My primary research is on application of Artificial Intelligence in Autonomic Cloud Management Services. At present I am involved in research and development of performance monitoring, real-time data acquisition, and implementation of AppFlow data structure for application profiling, which will be used to make proactive and reactive automated decisions to dynamically scale up/down cloud computing resources.

Hamid Alipour, Ph.d. Student Since 2010 (personal web page)


My Previous Research as CAC member was the Domain Name Self Protection System (DNS-APS). In that project we implemented the Domain Name Automated Protection System which could detect Most of the DNS attacks with high accuracy. Currently I'm working on a Wireless Autonomic Protection System(WAPS) to detect and neutralize wireless threats against Wifi (IEEE 802.11) protocol. We are going to apply temporal behavior analysis besides wireless flow analysis to achieve an accurate Intrusion protection System. In addition WAPS have the capability to do proactive actions against the detected threats to neutralize the impact of the detected attacks and block the future attackers.

Farah Farjo, Ph.D. student

I am conducting a power and performance management-related research project for IBM Data Centers and cloud computing. The goal of the project is to build a large scale platform for a high performance server that is capable of detecting its current workload and self managing autonomously. The platform implements algorithms for detecting Virtual Machine's workload and the characteristics involved (CPU, Memory, I/O, NOP), and, in turn, allocates hardware resources appropriately.

Cihan Tunc, Ph. D. student (personal web page)

Cloud computers and data centers require intelligent management architectures especially while power consumption is an emerging issue for such systems. The goal of this project is to build autonomously managed cloud systems in order to reduce the power consumption while maintaining the workload performance. My research for this project is workload characterization and modeling in order to identify the performance and to predict the possible future workload for hardware resource allocation decision.