Meeting in (and Over) the Cloud

Palo Alto, 8 June, 2009 -- HP hosted the first ever Open Cirrus Summit on cloud computing, bringing together sites and researchers participating in the Open Cirrus collaborative test environment to share project progress, discuss new opportunities and further solidify research into all aspects of large-scale cloud systems.

The Open Cirrus cloud computing research test bed, launched in July 2008, is designed to support research collaborations among industry, academia and governments into the design, provisioning, and management of computing services at a global, multi-datacenter scale.

The two-day summit, held at HP Labs in Palo Alto, featured updates from the nine sites that currently host Open Cirrus test bed research environments around the world, as well as reports from many of the 50 research projects currently using the platform.

In opening the event, Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs, announced the addition of three leading research organizations to Open Cirrus: the Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and MIMOS, a strategic R&D organization under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Malaysia.

“Bringing these new institutions into the Open Cirrus community will expand the test bed to an unprecedented scale,” said Banerjee, noting that the expanded partnership makes Open Cirrus the most geographically diverse cloud computing test bed currently available to researchers.

“We’re excited to see the growing momentum behind this extraordinary partnership,” added 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.”

As well as learning about projects currently running on Open Cirrus, summit participants were invited to discuss cloud computing research in general, and to share their visions for the future development of cloud-based computing services.

A media lunch held on the first day, for example, saw Russ Daniels (VP and CTO Cloud Services Strategy) and Chris Whitney (director, HP Labs' Service Automation & Integration Lab) detail HP’s commitment to cloud-based services. Meanwhile, Andrew Chien spoke for Intel and Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo, offered insights into Yahoo’s approach. Academics speaking at the event included Professors Larry Peterson of Princeton University, Armando Fox of UC Berkeley’s RAD Lab and Rich Wolski of UC Santa Barbara.

“Since its introduction, the test bed has gained significant recognition by the global, collaborative research community,” noted Shugar in his remarks. It’s a community, he said, “that has expressed an urgent need for greater access to large-scale computing infrastructure along with an open-source cloud stack.” Both, said Shugar, are “essential to the study and advancement of the next wave of cloud applications and services.”