Google, Microsoft and Sun back internet research lab

Google, Microsoft and Sun are cooperating to fund a project that aims to make the Internet easier to run. The three companies are contributing $7.5 million to Reliable, Adaptive and Distributed Systems Lab, a five-year project at UC Berkeley that focuses on creating software to automate the admin systems for web services and e-commerce sites.

Using a technique known as statistical learning the Rad Systems Lab will try to automate many day-to-day administration jobs.

Google, Microsoft and Sun are contributing to the lab because all three have enormous data operations that currently demand huge numbers of people to keep running.

The development of the software powering these huge operations typically takes place in a very haphazard fashion. The lab aims to replace the patched up programs with more formally tested software that does the same job with far less human oversight.

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