The University of Arizona

Benefits of Membership

CAC members are afforded access to leading-edge developments in autonomic computing and to knowledge accumulated by academic researchers and other industry partners. New members will join a growing list of founding members that currently includes Raytheon, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), BPU Holdings (BPU), 802 Secure, Mitsubishi. Benefits of membership include:

  • Collaboration with faculty, graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and other center partners
  • Choice of project topics to be funded by members' own contributions
  • Formal periodic project reviews along with continuous informal interaction and timely access to reports, papers and intellectual property generated by the center
  • Access to unique world-class equipment, facilities, and other CAC infrastructure
  • Recruitment opportunities among excellent graduate students
  • Leveraging of investments, projects and activities by all CAC members
  • Spin-off initiatives leading to new partnerships, customers or teaming for competitive proposals to funded programs.

Facilities

Major existing facilities in the advanced computing and information systems research labs at UF, UA and Rutgers support the operation of the CAC Center. At present, facilities include cutting-edge computer systems and software infrastructuremirroring state-of-the-art capabilities found in industry settings. Its unique capabilities include upwards of 500 computing nodes based on Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, IBM Power and SUN Sparc systems; 50 Terabytes of storage; commercial and open-source OS software and middleware for virtualization, database management, Web-Services, grid computing, P2P computing, etc. CAC resources are locally and externally connected via high-speed networks.

Funding

Per NSF guidelines, industry and government contributions in the form of annual CAC memberships ($35K/year per regular membership), coupled with baseline funds from NSF and university matching funds, directly support the Center's expenses for personnel, equipment, travel, and supplies. Memberships provide funds to support the Center's graduate students on a one-to-one basis, and thus the size of the annual membership fee is directly proportional to the cost of supporting one graduate student, while NSF and university funds support various other costs of operation. Multiple annual memberships may be contributed by any organization wishing to support multiple students and/or projects. The initial operating budget for CAC is projected to be approximately $1.5M/year, including NSF and universities contributions, in an academic environment that is very cost effective. Thus, a single regular membership is an exceptional value. It represents less than 3% of the projected annual budget of the Center yet reaps the full benefit of Center activities, a research program that could be significantly more expensive in an industry or government facility.