Autonomous Distributed Systems Lab

The foundation of the digitised society

The Umeå University distributed systems' research focuses on the autonomous management of the resources and applications forming the digitized society. Target infrastructures span from single large-scale cloud datacenters, via federations of clouds, to the highly distributed clouds that potentially may become the backbone for the full-fledged Internet-of-Things (IoT) and the more flexible concept of Software-Defined Infrastructures. Research drivers are computed and data-intensive applications requiring, e.g., elastic locality-aware infrastructures to meet the rapid capacity and locality variations of industrial services and large-scale distributed environments that enable coordinated use of federated resources for eScience applications, and machine-to-machine applications in the IoT context.

Interdisciplinary Collaborations

The research itself is highly multidisciplinary, developing the future autonomous management systems with contributions from feedback control, discrete optimization, mathematical statistics, and artificial intelligence including, in particular, machine learning. Given the multidisciplinary nature of the research and the major industrial interests in the field, the research is frequently performed in formal or informal collaborations.

Among academic collaborations, one may highlight our central role in Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program, (WASP) – the largest individual research investment in Sweden in modern time with a budget of SEK 5.5 billion. Over the years, key industrial collaboration partners have included Ericsson Research (Stockholm and Lund, Sweden), Intel (Germany), IBM (multiple countries), Google (US), Red Hat (Spain), and TietoEvry (Sweden).

And where do they go?

For PhD students and postdoc researchers, being a member of the ADSlab is a step towards very interesting opportunities in research or leading-edge tech development - in both industry and academia. Recent departees to the industry have as their first or second job joined companies including Apple (US), IBM Research (Ireland), IBM (Canada), Lawrence Berkeley Lab (US),  Ericsson Research (5 people in Sweden and Canada), TietoEvry (Sweden), and Red Hat (Spain). Furthermore, about ten people have joined our own spin-off company - Elastisys.

Academic institutions that our former PhD students are employed at include - for example - Carnegie Mellon University (US), University of Massachusetts Amherst (US), and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden).