iQua Research Group

It has been ten years since the launch of the Agilos project, dating all the way back to the 1996 — 2000 period. The Agilos project represented the design and implementation of a Middleware Control Architecture for Application-aware Quality of Service Adaptations, which Baochun did as part of his PhD dissertation research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, under the supervision of Professor Klara Nahrstedt.

In a nutshell, the research objective of the Agilos project was to assist complex applications to make informed decisions regarding the timing and scale of QoS adaptations. The project implementation was performed in Windows NT 4.0, compiled with Visual C++ 4.2 (and later 6.0), and supported by ORBacus 2.1 (and later 3.0) as its CORBA framework. In its final revision around early 2000, it involved approximately 60,000 lines of code (LOC), developed across a distributed Windows-based platform. This work has led to the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award in the Field of Communications Systems in 2000.

We have just launched a dedicated web page for the Agilos project, as a special way to celebrate the ten year anniversary of its launch in late 1996, in a mailroom converted office facing the north of DCL, 1304 W. Springfield Avenue, Urbana, Illinois. The initial code development was performed in the summer of 1996, using a (then brand-new) Gateway PC powered by Pentium 200MHz MMX, 64MB of memory, as well as 1GB of disk space. At the time, it had one of the first host names in the MONET research group: cairo.cs.uiuc.edu.

The Gateway PC has been actively used to serve the official web site of the MONET research group till 2004. Unfortunately, the original project web page for the Agilos project has not been linked from the current MONET web site (and perhaps due to be phased out soon), making our ten-year anniversary web site more important.