Background
The term ultra-large-scale system was introduced in a 2006 report from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University authored by Linda Northrop and colleagues. The report explained that software intensive systems are reaching unprecedented scales (by measures including lines of code; numbers of users and stakeholders; purposes the system is put to; amounts of data stored, accessed, manipulated, and refined; numbers of connections and interdependencies among components; and numbers of hardware elements). When systems become ultra-large-scale, traditional approaches to engineering and management will no longer be adequate. The report argues that the problem is no longer of engineering systems or system of systems, but of engineering "socio-technical ecosystems".
At a similar time to the publication of the report by Northrop and others, a research and training initiative was being initiated in the UK on Large-scale Complex IT Systems. Many of the challenges recognized in this initiative were the same as, or were similar to those recognized as the challenges of ultra-large-scale systems. Greg Goth quotes Dave Cliff, director of the UK initiative as saying "The ULSS proposal and the LSCITS proposal were written entirely independently, yet we came to very similar conclusions about what needs to be done and about how to do it". A difference pointed out by Ian Sommerville is that the UK initiative began with a 5 to 10 year vision, while that of Northrop and her co-authors was much longer term. This seems to have led to there being two slightly different perspectives on ultra-large-scale systems. For example, Richard Gabriel's perspective is that ultra-large-scale systems are desirable but currently impossible to build due to limitations in the fields of software design and systems engineering. On the other hand, Ian Sommerville's perspective is that ultra-large-scale systems are already emerging (for example in air traffic control), the key problem being not how to achieve them but how to ensure they are adequately engineered.
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