Stanford University, SLAC, NIIT

Prepared by Les Cottrell, SLAC

for the Convocation Dinner NIIT , March 9, 2007

Stanford University• Location

Some facts• Founded in 1890’s by Governor Leland Stanford &

wife Jane – in memory of son Leland Stanford Jr.– Apocryphal story of foundation

• Movies invented at Stanford

• 1600 freshman entrants/year (12% acceptance), 7:1 student:faculty, students from 53 countries

• 169K living Stanford alumni

Some alumni• Sports: Tiger Woods, John McEnroe

• Sally Ride Astronaut

• Vint Cerf “father of Internet”

• Industry:– Hewlett & Packard, Steve Ballmer CEO Microsoft, Scott

McNealy Sun …

• Ex-presidents: Ehud Barak Israel, Alejandro Toledo Peru

• US Politics: Condoleeza Rice, George Schultz, President Hoover

Some Startups• Founded Silicon Valley (turned orchards into

companies): – Start by providing land and encouragement (investment)

for companies started by Stanford alumni, such as HP & Varian

– More recently: Sun (Stanford University Network), Cisco, Yahoo, Google

Excellence• 17 Nobel prizewinners• Stanford Hospital• Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) – my home:

– National Lab operated by Stanford University funded by US Department of Energy

– Roughly 1400 staff, + contractors & outside users => 3000, ~ 2000 on site at a given time

– Fundamental research in:• Experimental particle physics• Theoretical physics• Accelerator research• Astro-physics• Synchrotron Light research

– Has faculty to pursue above research and awards degrees, 3 Nobel prizewinners

Work with NIITStart 2004, MoU, funding from Pak MoST & US State Dept.Development of students, build research capacity, develop

publicly available tools, publish etc., e.g.:– Quantify the Digital Divide:

• Develop a robust measurement infrastructure to provide information on the extent of the Digital Divide

• Develop innovative visualization tools• Improve understanding, provide planning information, expectations, identify

needs (e.g. last mile problems, fragility, congestion …), report to politicians, funding agencies, net operators, end users, is it good enough for Grids, telemedicine (e.g. consulting expertise for poor communities)…

• Case studies for S. Asia, Pakistan, Africa• Provide and deploy tools in Pakistan (NIIT, QAU, PERN)

– Geo-location of hosts– Network Weather Forecasting; Anomaly: detection, diagnosis and

alerting

Students • About a dozen students at NIIT co-supervision SLAC/NIIT• Plus 6 chosen students with internships at SLAC for one

year each:– Exposure to National Lab and world class network experts, work

on state of the art projects, exposure to high speed networks such as will be available in Pakistan with PERN2,

– Take courses at Stanford– 3 currently at SLAC– 3 students completed their year, will return to NIIT as research

assistants to share experiences:• One returned to NIIT to pursue PhD• One to startup company in Silicon Valley• One to U of New South Wales

Experiences

• Extremely successful on-going collaboration– Developed and refined effective ways of communicating at a

distance– Useful tool kits developed and made publicly available– Many publications and public presentations

• Students hard-working, dedicated, enthusiastic and innovative

• Have performed well in course work at Stanford, compare well with Stanford students

• Next step: proposal to join the International perfSONAR project (currently: Europe, US & Brazilian NRENs):– provide open set of protocols + ref. implementation for

cross-domain sharing of network measurements