NSF To Fund National Cloud Testbed That Uses Core Technology from Red Hat, Others

The National Science Foundation will help fund the development of a national cloud testbed for research and development of new cloud computing platforms. The funding builds on R&D technology formed under a partnership which includes Red Hat, among others.

by Vance McCarthy

Tags: cloud, FPGA, MOC, NSF, open, R&D, Red Hat, testbed,

The National Science Foundation will help fund the development of a national cloud testbed for research and development of new cloud computing platforms.

 

The NSF grant supports an innovative public-cloud testbed initiative co-founded in part by Red Hat, alongside academia, government and other private and non-profit firms. 

 

The grant which was awarded to a research team from Boston University, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts -Amherst (UMass) to fund development of “a national cloud testbed” for research and development of new cloud computing platforms.

 

The testbed, known as the Open Cloud Testbed, will integrate capabilities previously developed for the CloudLab testbed into the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), of which Red Hat is a founding partner.

 

Under the grant, Red Hat will work with Northeastern University and UMass, as well as other government and industry collaborators, to build the national testbed on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies.

 

This project will construct and support a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud platforms - the underlying software which provides cloud services to applications. It will further speed the tech transfer of such cloud technology from academia to commercial and practical use.

 

In specific, the new testbed will combine proven software technologies with a real production cloud enhanced with programmable hardware - Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) - capabilities not present in other facilities available to researchers today.

 

The combination of a testbed and production cloud will allow

(a) larger scale compared to isolated testbeds,

(b) reproducible experimentation based on realistic user behavior and applications, as well as

(c) a model for transitioning successful research results to practice.

NSF described the focus and rationale for the grant as follows:

The testbed offers a unique sustainability model, by allowing additional compute resources to be dynamically moved from institutional uses into the testbed and back again, providing a path to growth beyond the initial testbed.

The project will support educating the next generation of researchers in this field, and existing relationships with industrial partners of the affiliated production cloud will accelerate technology transfer from academic research to practical use.

MOC was launched in 2014 to bring together academia, government, non-profit, and industry to create an "open, production-grade public cloud suitable for cutting-edge" R&D.  Red Hat was a co-founder and has served as a core partner ever since.

 

The MOC’s open cloud stack is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.

 

Officials cited several goals and expected benefits from the investment in the MOC-based testbed.  Among them:   

  • To offer a “unique sustainability model” by allowing additional compute resources to be dynamically moved from institutional uses into the testbed and back again, providing a path to growth beyond the initial testbed.
  • To accelerate innovation in cloud technologies by "democratizing" cloud computing research and allowing increased collaboration between the research and open source communities. The project will provide capabilities that today “are only available to researchers within a few large commercial cloud providers.” This investment will allow diverse communities to exploit cloud technologies,
  • To leverage programmable hardware that can enable investigation into hardware acceleration techniques
  • To design and develop software tools to provide easy and efficient access by these researchers, tutorials, workshops, and webinars will offer training in the use of these tools and the testbed itself.
  • To promote community outreach that will identify, attract, and retain interested researchers, and to educate them in the use of the facility. These activities aim to assist researchers who explore complex distributed systems and cloud platforms, spanning a diverse range of backgrounds, institutions, and regions.

Speaking about the award, Michael Zink, associate professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), University of Massachusetts Amherst, said, “This testbed will help accelerate innovation in cloud technologies, technologies affecting almost all of computing today.

 

“By providing capabilities that currently are only available to researchers within a few large commercial cloud providers, the new testbed will allow diverse communities to exploit these technologies, thus ‘democratizing’ cloud-computing research and allowing increased collaboration between the research and open-source communities. We look forward to continuing the collaboration in MOC to see what we can accomplish with the testbed.” 

 

Orran Krieger, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University; co-director, Red Hat Collaboratory; PI, Massachusetts Open Cloud has this to say.

 

“An important part of the MOC has always been to enable cloud computing research by the academic community. This project dramatically expands our ability to support researchers both by providing much richer capabilities and by expanding from a regional to a national community of researchers.”

 

MOC is currently managed at Boston University’s Hariri Institute for Computing.  Other commercial / open source vendors supporting MOC include: Cisco, EMC, SGI, Juniper, Canonical, Dell, Intel, Mellanox, Brocade, DataDirect Networks, Mathworks, Plexxi, Enterprise DB and Riverbed.




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