Community Cluster named in honor of UD Prof. Emeritus David L. Mills

The new UD Community Cluster has been named Mills in honor of David L. Mills, UD professor emeritus and a pioneer of the early Internet and its precursor networks. The Mills cluster is expected to begin full operation in January.

Mills was a professor in the University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1986-2008 and continues to teach and lead research sponsored by such agencies as the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Science Foundation.

Mills played an essential role in the development of the internetwork gateways and protocols that provide the backbone to today’s Internet, and actively participated in the evolution of Internet protocol (IP), transmission control protocol (TCP), file transfer protocol (FTP), simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP), Telnet and other protocols on which modern researchers rely.

In particular, his Network Time Protocol (NTP) was essential to the early development of the ARPANet, which led to the modern Internet. The protocol enables precise time synchronization, without which online experiments could not be accurately measured and controlled, stock market buy and sell orders could not be timed and web streaming of video would be chaotic.

The protocol makes possible such online activities as aviation traffic control and monitoring, radio and TV programming launch and control, multimedia synchronization for real-time teleconferencing and traffic engineering.

As part of the group of researchers who helped build the Internet, Mills once said in an interview that the project "was great fun."

"The strangest thing about the whole process is that we were inventing email, file transfer protocols and remote interactive access, using the very infrastructure that we were developing," Mills said. "In other words, we were building the infrastructure so that we could build the infrastructure. I learned the most important lesson of my life from this experience -- that people who are actually going to use services should be the ones to build them."

"The University of Delaware is proud to name its new computing cluster in honor of Prof. David L. Mills, whose influence on and contributions to computing, networking, and computer engineering at the University and whose contributions to the development of the protocols behind the Internet itself cannot be overstated," said Carl Jacobson, vice president for Information Technologies .