Open Cirrus Cloud Testbed Launches
Almost exactly one year ago we started an initiative with Yahoo! to test-pilot one of their large computing clusters. Well, it has been a very busy year. This past week a review was conducted of our use of the Yahoo! M45 cluster and, in a nutshell, it has proven to be really valuable. In talking to Randy Bryant and Garth Gibson about the review, one thing that jumps out at me is the extent to which access to big computing resources really gets researchers to think up new, bigger problems to solve. Ultimately, it seems clear that researchers are able to consume any amount of computing and data-access power, and that access to such resources has a fundamental effect on research.
So, anyway, the pilot project is done and we can declare it a great success. Working with Yahoo! Research on this was also very good. What’s next? Well, Yahoo!, Intel, and HP announced this week the launch of the Open Cirrus Testbed. This will expand the access to M45-style cloud computing clusters to the research community. Initially, 7 clusters will be built. One of them will be provided by Intel and housed here at Carnegie Mellon, to be housed in the Data Center Observatory run by Greg Ganger and Garth Gibson. Through an RFP process, researchers anywhere will be able to gain access to these cloud resources, and while some technical details about how these clusters will be shared, the type of virtualization, etc. have yet to be worked out, it seems clear to us, based on the past year’s experience, that this will become an extremely important resource for computing research.
Peter Lee @ November 16, 2008