CCRI: Grand: Developing a Testbed for the Research Community Exploring Next-Generation Cloud Platforms

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Cloud computing plays an important role in supporting most software we use in our daily lives. 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. Testbeds such as this are critical for enabling research into new cloud technologies - research that requires experiments which potentially change the operation of the cloud itself. 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 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. The programmable hardware will be a unique resource enabling investigation into hardware acceleration techniques, and the community outreach portion of the project aims to identify, attract, and retain interested researchers, and to educate them in the use of the facility. 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.This testbed will accelerate innovation in cloud technologies; technologies affecting almost all of computing today. In providing capabilities that today are only available to researchers within a few large commercial cloud providers, it will allow diverse communities to exploit these technologies, "democratizing" cloud computing research, and allowing increased collaboration between the research and open source communities. The community outreach activities of the project are targeted to researchers who explore complex distributed systems and cloud platforms, spanning a diverse range of backgrounds, institutions, and regions. Software tools will be developed 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. 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.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.