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."
IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, the IEEE/ISTO, and key members of the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum met recently to address how they could work with the community to drive cloud computing markets and technologies forward. Jesse Silver, one of the CCIF's four co-creators, spoke to me after the meeting, and Reuven Cohen released a single paragraph of minutes on his blog Tuesday morning:
Yesterday representatives of CCIF, CloudCamp, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and the IEEE-ISTO met while attending the Cloud Computing Expo in New York. Other companies were invited but were unable to attend, generally due to the short notice. The companies agreed on a shared goal to promote use and awareness of open and interoperable cloud computing. The group brainstormed several ideas including the possibility to build on the momentum created by CloudCamp. Another topic was the ability to enable participants, from individuals and companies, both large and small, to be able to contribute to and use the results of broad community collaboration. Additionally, the possibility of a trade association or marketing association for cloud computing was discussed but no specific actions were agreed. The final topic was the need to have broader participation from the community in this discussion.
Jesse noted the conversation was extremely civil, and that each participant contributed positively to the discussion. That alone is great news to me. The atmosphere of the meeting was a key indicator to me about the likelihood that we could build open cloud standards in a cooperative, rather than competitive, fashion.
There are not a lot of details to be had about the specifics of the conversation, though it was clear that no company was willing to make any firm commitment to a specific action at this time. Just the willingness to both open future conversation to the general community and to support the organization needed to make a community targeted and productive is a great start, however.
Circumstances behind the release of the Open Cloud Manifesto on Monday morning--which was promoted by IBM and rejected very publicly by Microsoft--were not discussed. Jesse made it clear that both companies have clearly decided to put the incident behind them.
Now attention turns to Reuven's upcoming keynote at the Cloud Computing Expo, and the CCIF meeting to be held there on Thursday night. If the community embraces both the need for a trade organization and the open process proposed to establish and run it, then this may have been a very important meeting. If not, it will be another sign that the Web 2.0 era has dramatically effected industry organization and standards development.
Either way, the meeting itself signaled the acknowledgment by big business of the power of the cloud computing community. That alone is history in the making.
Update: Almost immediately after I posted this, I came across another cloud alliance that was organized to explore cloud security, thanks to Chris Hoff. Is there an opportunity here for some cooperation between the two communities (interoperability and security) moving forward?
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