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August 04, 2008
A Sandbox for Cloud Researchers
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On the theory that many heads in the cloud are better than one, three tech giants are giving some lucky researchers on-demand access to all the resources they need to work advancing cloud computing.
The HP, Intel and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed, announced last week, is meant to promote open, collaborative research in cloud computing by providing large-scale environments where hardware and software designers can try out their large-scale ideas. The three giants funding the program are banking on smart people in academia, government, and industry to help come up with the best ways to build, connect, manage and deploy systems that deliver compute power on demand.
The test bed will be made up of six datacenters, hosted at HP Labs, Intel Research, Yahoo, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and the Infocomm Development Authority in Singapore. Each facility will house 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores (mainly HP and Intel hardware, naturally) running under the open-source distributed computing system Hadoop.
At the announcement of the new program, Prith Banerjee, HP’s senior vice president of research and director of HP Labs, said that enabling researchers to work on “intelligent infrastructure, radically new architectures, massive storage, and sustainable IT systems” will usher in the “era of ‘everything as a service’ -- everything will act seamlessly through the cloud based on user location, preference, and community.” Banerjee said the project is essentially giving researchers their own “utility” to develop the cloud “as a platform for new services and experiences.”
“The test bed simulates a real-life, global, Internet-scale environment, which gives researchers an unprecedented ability to test applications and measure the performance of infrastructures and services built to run on large-scale cloud systems,” Russ Daniels, chief technology officer of HP Cloud Services, told GRIDtoday. “Because the test bed operates at Internet-scale, researchers can tackle larger problems, increase the speed at which experiments can be performed, investigate new parallel programming models, and train students that are at the frontier of the computing industry.”
Each of the big three will be contributing research results, as well. HP has five areas it’s focusing on. One, Daniels says, is to develop “an enterprise storage service that can automatically scale to store petabytes of data across geographically dispersed locations, and offers a non-stop, fault-tolerant, self-managing platform that can be simultaneously used by multiple parties for different purposes.”
Cells as a Service is a prototype system for managing cloud infrastructure based on “service cells.” Each cell can contain “an arbitrary assembly of virtual machines, virtual storage volumes, and virtual networks, connected in whatever design of IT infrastructure a customer desires,” Daniels says. “Cells are securely isolated from one another, although connectivity between cells can be established in controlled ways. This enables the management of a cloud infrastructure to be automated and allows for the dynamic deployment and management of services offered through the cloud.”
Another group will be working on ways to lower the energy consumption of the huge datacenters that will be required for cloud computing, Daniels says, while another focuses on low-cost “building-block components” that would reduce the cost of datacenters.
Intel is less specific about its cloud-specific research, but considering it makes the compute cores, it’s easy to imagine the company implementing functions that would enhance scalability and virtualization, or reduce heat, for example. This program falls under Intel’s “exploratory research” bucket, a spokesperson says, “which means it’s off-roadmap and more looking at the next five to 10 years.”
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