Open Cloud Testbed: Developing Testbeds for Research Communities Exploring Next-Gen Cloud Platforms
Cloud testbeds are critical for enabling research into new cloud technologies – research that requires experiments that potentially change the operation of the cloud itself. Several such testbeds have been created in the recent past (e.g., Chameleon, CloudLab, etc.) with the goal to support the CISE systems research community. It has been shown that these testbeds are very popular and heavily used by the research community. Testbed utilization often reaches 100%, especially ahead of deadlines for major systems conferences, while there are also periods of modest (less than 40%) testbed usage.
In my talk, I will present our NSF “Open Cloud Testbed” (OCT) project, which has the goal to enable elastic cloud testbeds for systems research. Eventually, OCT will allow cloud testbeds to grow and shrink by allocating and deallocating additional resources from compute facilities like production clouds and HPC clusters. Within the OCT project, we will create a prototype elastic cloud testbed, which will combine proven software technologies from both the CloudLab and the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC) projects. It will also combine a research cloud testbed (CloudLab) with a production cloud (MOC) through OCT’s tight integration with the latter and federation with CloudLab. In addition, OCT will provide programmable hardware (FPGAs) as Bump-in-the-Wire (BITW) capabilities not present in other facilities available to researchers today. The combination of a testbed and production cloud allows 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. OCT 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.
Speaker: Michael Zink
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