Open Cirrus is an open cloud-computing research testbed designed to support research into design, provisioning, and management of services at a global, multi-datacenter scale. The open nature of the testbed is designed to encourage research into all aspects of service and datacenter management. In addition, they hope to foster a collaborative community around the testbed, providing ways to share tools, lessons and best practices, and ways to benchmark and compare alternative approaches to service management at datacenter scale.
There are a number of important and useful testbeds, such as PlanetLab, EmuLab, IBM/Google cluster, and Amazon EC2/S3, that enable researchers to study different aspects of distrubuted computing. However, no single testbed supports research spanning systems, applications, services, open-source development, and datacenters. Towards this end, we have developed Open Cirrus, a cloud computing testbed for the research community that federates heterogeneous distributed data centers.
Open Cirrus offers a cloud stack consisting of physical and virtual machines, and global services such as sign-on, monitoring, storage, and job submission. By developing the testbed and making it available to the research community, we hope to help spur innovation in cloud computing and catalyze the development of an open source stack for the cloud.
The Open Cirrus testbed is a collection of federated datacenters for open-source systems and services research. The testbed is composed of nine sites in North America, Europe, and Asia. Each site consists of a cluster with at least 1000 cores and associated storage. Authorized users can access any Open Cirrus site using the same login credentials.
The Open Cirrus project aims to provide systems researchers with a testbed of distributed data centers they can use for systems-level (as well as applications and services) cloud computing research. Open Cirrus aims to achieve the following goals:
Foster system-level Research in Cloud Computing
Encourage New Cloud Computing Applications and Applications-Level Research
Collection of Experimental Datasets
Develop Open-Source Stacks and APIs for the Cloud
Open Cirrus is a trademark of Yahoo Inc and the project is a joint initiative sponsored by HP, Intel, and Yahoo, in collaboration with NSF, the University of Illinois (UIUC), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI ), the Malaysian Institute for Microelectronic Systems (MIMOS ), and the Institute for System Programming at the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISPRAS). Additional Open Cirrus site members are expected to join.
Testbed Sites
Open Cirrus is a collaboration of several organizations:
Dejan Milojicic, Senior Research Manager at HP Labs and Managing Director of Open Cirrus, talks about the Open Cirrus global computing testbed, and the progress they have made since its launch.
The Open Cirrus Project, is a collaboration led by Intel, HP and Yahoo to create an open, Internet-scale testbed for advancing cloud computing research with sites worldwide. The Open Cirrus Cloud Computing Testbed provides resources to enable systems software research in cloud computing.
The Low-power Mobile Computing Vision demo shows how cloud computing can make cutting-edge computing vision applications practical on mobile devices by offloading computations to processors in your home, office, or in the cloud.
The Dicer project uses the Open Cirrus testbed to develop new software tools to make interactive, scalable analysis of massive data sets as simple as using a spreadsheet.
Intel is collaborating to provide the Open Cirrus cloud computing testbed with several organizations, including the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) in Europe. The testbed's ten worldwide computing clusters form a facility for research in cloud computing system software and federation.
This paper is an overview of the Open Cirrus Cloud Computing Testbed, a federated testbed of distributed clusters for systems and applications research. Open Cirrus offers unique opportunities for conducting research that none of the previous or current testbeds have offered (federation of heterogeneous sites, systems and applications research, and datasets). In addition, it offers an open stack with non-proprietary APIs for Cloud Computing. Through shared innovation it offers an economical model for an increased impact on communities around the globe.
Authors: HP Labs: Kevin Lai, Martha Lyons, Dejan Milojicic; IDA: Hing Yan Lee, Yeng Chai Soh; Intel Research: Michael Kozuch, David O'Hallaron; KIT: Marcel Kunze; UIUC: Roy Campbell, Indranil Gupta, Mike Heath, Steve Ko; Yahoo: Thomas Kwan.
Research Scientist in the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs and lead developer of the Open Cirrus cloud computing system, Kevin Lai, gives a talk at Google on a clean slate approach to designing a cloud computing architecture. They apply economic mechanisms to resources at every layer from the high-level Hadoop system through the allocation of virtualized resources to physical servers. They find that this approach simplifies system design, provides more high-level optimization opportunities, provides greater control over predictability, and increases overall application utility.
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