Ecosystem for Research Networking

The Open Cloud Testbed
2020-02-10 16:00 (America/New_York)
Speaker: Michael Zink – Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract: A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Boston University, and Northeastern University recently received an award from the National Science Foundation to construct and support a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud Testbeds such as this are critical for enabling research into new cloud technologies. This is research that requires experiments which potentially can change the operation of the cloud itself. By providing capabilities that currently are only available to researchers within a few large commercial cloud providers, the new testbed will allow diverse communities to exploit these technologies, thus “democratizing” cloud computing research and allowing increased collaboration between the research and open source communities.
Speaker Bio: Michael Zink is currently Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He received his PhD in 2003 from the Multimedia Communications Laboratory at Darmstadt University of Technology. He works in the areas of future multimedia systems, Internet architectures, and sensor networks. Dr. Zink is a senior member of the IEEE and ACM.

Chameleon: How to Build a Cloud++
2019-12-16 03:30 - 16:00
Speaker: Kate Keahey – Senior Fellow, University of Chicago Computation institute

Abstract: Chameleon is a large-scale, deeply reconfigurable experimental platform built to support Computer Sciences systems research. Community projects range from systems research developing exascale operating systems, virtualization methods, performance variability studies, and power management research to projects in software defined networking, machine learning, and resource management. What makes Chameleon unique is that it provides these sophisticated capabilities based on a mainstream infrastructure cloud system (OpenStack). In this talk, I will explain the challenges we faced in building Chameleon, lessons learned, operations experiences, and describe our packaging of the system that integrates both the developed capabilities and the operational experience and facilitates managing platforms of this kind.

Speaker Bio: Kate Keahey is one of the pioneers of infrastructure cloud computing. The Nimbus project she created is recognized as one of the first open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service implementations and she continues to work on research aligning cloud computing concepts with the needs of scientific centers and applications. To facilitate such research for the community at large, Kate leads the Chameleon project, providing a deeply reconfigurable, large-scale, and open experimental platform for Computer Science systems research. Kate also co-founded and serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of the SoftwareX journal, a new format designed to publish software contributions. Kate is a Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.

Building a state-of-the-art campus compute resource at Franklin & Marshall College
2019-12-02 15:00 - 16:00
Speaker: Carrie Rampp – Vice President and CIO, Franklin & Marshall College

Abstract: Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) is building and deploying a campus cluster resource to better meet the needs of our researchers and their students who need greater access to high performance compute resources to support intensive data analysis and computation. This project provides much needed local compute nodes for F&M’s researchers and students while also contributing to the growing fabric of shared computing clusters across the country. This project contributes these new resources to the Open Science Grid (OSG) which is a national, distributed computing partnership that allows participants to share their resources with other researchers to maximize the impact these investments have on scientific research and discovery.

The Open Storage Network: Distributed Storage Infrastructure for Data-Driven Science
2019-11-04 15:00 - 16:00
Speaker: Alex Szalay – Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract: The Open Storage Network(OSN) is a network of storage nodes distributed across the US that is designed to simplify sharing of active scientific data sets. While other uses may emerge over time, the OSN is intended initially to serve two principal needs: (1) facilitate smooth flow of large data sets between data and computing resources such as instruments, synthetic data projects, campus or regional data centers, and cloud providers; and (2) make it easy to expose long tail data sets to the entire scientific community. The current pilot deployment, which consists of CEPH storage nodes at five sites across the US, started to host and expanding set of scientific data sets in January 2020.

Speaker Bio: Alexander Szalay is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of the Institute for Data Intensive Science. He is a cosmologist, working on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation. He is a Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received an Alexander Von Humboldt Award in Physical Sciences, in 2007 the Microsoft Jim Gray Award. In 2008 he became Doctor Honoris Causa of the Eotvos University, Budapest.

The FABRIC Testbed
2019-10-21 15:00 - 16:00
Speaker: Jim Griffoen – Professor and Director, University of Kentucky Center for Computational Sciences

Abstract: FABRIC is a unique national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge and exploratory research at-scale in networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing and storage systems, machine learning, and science applications. FABRIC is an everywhere programmable nationwide instrument comprised of novel extensible network elements equipped with large amounts of compute and storage, interconnected by high speed, dedicated optical links. It will connect a number of specialized testbeds (5G/IoT PAWR, NSF Clouds) and high-performance computing facilities to create a rich fabric for a wide variety of experimental activities.

Speaker Bio: Jim Griffoen is Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Center for Computational Sciences, and Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Networking at the University of Kentucky. his research interests include future network architectures, cloud computing, programmable networks/software defined networks, network measurement and monitoring systems, experimental testbed networks, network virtualization, and network protocol design.

Atrio – Composable Cloud Computing
2019-10-07 15:00 - 16:00
Atrio Dynamically provisions applications and platforms using an intelligent scheduling and provisioning stack on top of existing infrastructure, forming an elastic edge-to-cloud computing network
