Motivation and Context

Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0018-9162/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE Pay-as-you-go utility computing services by companies such as Amazon and new initiatives by Google, IBM, Microsoft, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have begun to provide applications researchers in areas such as machine learning and scientific computing with access to large-scale cluster resources. However, system researchers, who are developing the techniques and software infrastructure to support cloud computing, still have trouble obtaining low-level access to such resources. Open Cirrus (http://opencirrus.org) aims to address this problem by providing a single testbed of heterogeneous distributed data centers for systems, applications, services, and open source development research. The project is a joint initiative sponsored by Hewlett-Packard (HP), Intel, and Yahoo! in collaboration with the NSF, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore, the Russian Academy of T here is growing interest in cloud computing within the systems and applications research communities. However, systems researchers often find it difficult to do credible work without access to large-scale distributed data centers. Application researchers could also benefit from being able to control the deployment and consumption of hosted services across a distributed cloud computing testbed. Open Cirrus is a cloud computing testbed that, unlike existing alternatives, federates distributed data centers. It aims to spur innovation in systems and applications research and catalyze development of an open source service stack for the cloud. Arutyun I. Avetisyan, Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences