Project's aim: safety for computer systems

CHICAGO — In a bow to their past as computer-science pioneers, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign researchers Wednesday launched an ambitious initiative to essentially reinvent large-scale computing, making it far more reliable and secure than it has been.

Partnering with government and several industry heavy hitters, the academic scientists have built a small prototype of what they call Trusted ILLIAC and soon will link together some 500 processors into a secure and reliable supercomputer.

"We'll demonstrate Trusted ILLIAC within a year," said Ravi Iyer, chief scientist at the university's Information Trust Institute in Urbana. "We expect within two or three years that our industrial partners will be demonstrating this technology."

University researchers have developed monitoring methods enabling them to predict the reliability and security of a computing system. This will make for an invaluable test-bed for industrial partners, Iyer said.

Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, IBM and AT&T are among the companies collaborating with the university on the project, which is named for the ILLIAC computer first built on the Urbana campus in 1952. In those days, security meant locking the door to the room where the 5-ton computer was housed.

Most computer-security measures today are piecemeal responses to new threats from hackers, said William Sanders, director of the Information Trust Institute. University researchers have taken a more fundamental approach, designing a system with hardware and software to recognize the application being run on the computer.

The system will reconfigure itself to optimize running each different application and keep alert for viruses and other security threats. It also is forgiving of bugs in the software.

"The programs themselves will remain buggy," Sanders said.

While the project is aimed at improving the large computing systems used by major companies rather than personal computers used at home, its effects should be seen by nearly anyone using the Internet, Sanders said.

"This should improve the reliability and security of transactions made with companies like Amazon and eBay," he said. "It will have a big impact on pervasive computing and the handheld devices like the PDAs and BlackBerries that people use."

Several industrial partners were on hand last week at the University Club of Chicago, where researchers announced their initiative.

"This is a version of a computer automating itself," said Matthias Kaiserswerth, an IBM vice president.

"It fulfills the promise of an idea IBM unveiled five years ago — autonomic computing — and we're intrigued by it."

Paul Steinberg, a Motorola vice president, said the project promises to provide a reliable, secure computing platform that companies can use "so that it doesn't have to be re-engineered again and again for each product."

The project "is redefining how we thinking about computing," said Joe Pato, a top technologist for Hewlett-Packard.