The Wisdom of Clouds

HP, Intel, and Yahoo are announcing Monday at the first Open Cirrus Summit that they have signed on three more research organizations to their joint cloud test bed. The new institutions include the Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, and MIMOS, a strategic research and development organization under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Malaysia.

Open Cirrus, described by the companies as "a global, multiple data center, open-source test bed for the advancement of cloud-computing research," was launched in July of 2008, and represented one of the first large-scale systems deployments targeted at teaching and researching large-scale cloud architectures. IBM and Google have teamed up on a similar project.

According to the announcement, the three organizations will take on a variety of roles targeted at developing "tools and best practices," and "will help further benchmark and compare alternative approaches to service management at datacenter scale". Specific roles were described as follows:

• Russian Academy of Sciences, the first Eastern European institution to join Open Cirrus, encompassing three organizations:

  • Institute for System Programming (ISP) will conduct fundamental scientific research and applications in the field of system programming.
  • Joint SuperComputer Center (JSCC) will engage in the processing of large arrays of biological data, nanotechnology, 3D modeling, and other applications, and port them to cloud infrastructure.
  • Russian Research Center Kurchatov Institute will explore how cloud computing is different from other technologies, and apply its techniques for large-scale data processing.

• Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (South Korea) plans to conduct research and development on the management architecture and content retrieval of massive data sets.

• MIMOS (Malaysia) will develop a national cloud-computing platform to deploy services throughout Malaysia, focusing on enabling services through software, security frameworks, and mobile interactivity, as well as testing new cloud tools and methodologies.

"We're excited to see the growing momentum behind this extraordinary partnership--the Open Cirrus test bed," said Andrew Chien, vice president and director of Intel Research. "The new sites bring growing critical mass and more contributors to our vision of an open-source cloud stack as a strong, large-scale platform for research and development."