Press release
HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. today announced that three new research organizations will join Open CirrusTM, a global, multiple data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research.
The new entities, which 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, were revealed today at the first Open Cirrus Summit.
The Open Cirrus cloud computing test bed, which was launched in July 2008, was created to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing. The test bed, which has more than 50 research projects currently underway, simulates a real-life, global, Internet-scale environment and gives researchers an unprecedented ability to test applications and measure the performance of infrastructure and services built to run on large-scale cloud systems.
"Collaborating with academia, government and industry for innovation is vital in charting the course for the future of cloud computing in which everything will be delivered as a service," said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs. "Bringing the new institutions into the Open Cirrus community will expand the test bed to an unprecedented scale."
With the expansion of the Open Cirrus community, researchers worldwide will have access to new approaches and skill sets that will enable them to more quickly realize the full potential of cloud computing. Further, the new institutes will host additional test bed research sites and expand the global footprint of Open Cirrus to nine locations, creating the most geographically diverse cloud computing test bed currently available to researchers.
"The Open Cirrus test bed project is expanding its reach to new geographies and audiences around the globe and engaging the open-source community in the research and development of new cloud applications and services," said Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo!. "Since its introduction, the test bed has gained significant recognition by the global, collaborative research community, which has expressed an urgent need for greater access to large-scale computing infrastructure along with an open-source cloud stack essential to the study and advancement of the next wave of cloud applications and services."
The new sites will contribute tools and best practices, and will help further benchmark and compare alternative approaches to service management at datacenter scale. They are:
- 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 ports 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."
The Open Cirrus Summit brings together participating sites and researchers to share project progress, discuss new opportunities and further solidify research into all aspects of service and data center management.
More information about Open Cirrus, research in cloud computing and other key industry issues is available at https://opencirrus.org/.
