Explaining exactly what Vince Lehman, a computer science senior, does five days a week at the University of Memphis gets a little complicated. The short answer is he’s helping build a new and better internet from the ground up. After that, “it gets tough to explain,” the 24-year-old student said.
For four semesters, Lehman has worked on the Named Data Networking Next Phase project, a University of California-Los Angeles endeavor which hopes to revolutionize the way information is shared online. On the second floor of Dunn Hall in a computer lab with more than a dozen servers and only two narrow windows facing a brick wall, Lehman and six other students furiously type long strands of code and run simulated algorithms.
The students described their work as puzzle solving. However, explaining the project’s purpose has gotten them some puzzled looks.
“People don’t really have any idea how the current internet works,” Lehman, the Memphis system administrator, said. “This makes it hard to describe why a new internet is needed.”
These complexities have not halted the venture’s movement or funding. Over the summer, The National Science Foundation awarded $5 million to fund the undertaking. That money was dispersed among the eight universities working on the project, including $350,000 given to U of M associate professor of computer science Dr. Lan Wang, the Memphis principle investigator since 2010.
Every time someone searches for data on the internet, the browser usually hunts for the original source, Wang said. For instance, most searches for a video will be directed toward the server it is stored on.
“This makes the search for that content slow,” she said. “If the video is popular then it will play slower because everyone is retrieving it from the one source.”
However, the video already exists in many users caches. In the new system that Wang is working on, the internet will allow other users to retrieve public data from nearby user’s caches reducing search times and bandwidth used.
Right now, the internet is like walking into a crowded room wanting to know what time it is, explained Marc Badrian, a computer science senior, is also working on the project.
“You have to bump your way through the crowed and ask the one guy wearing a watch what time it is,” Badrian said. “The new system will be like if you stood on a chair and asked everyone what time it is. Most likely, other people in the room would have asked the watch wearer ‘what time it is’ and they will be able to answer you without you having to go to the original source of the information.”
