While cloud computing has become an established technology, fundamental to all major 21st century economic activities, many open questions remain. Examples include investigating the relationship between cloud computing and HPC, combining programmable clouds with programmable networks/SDN, and using cloud computing as an elastic platform for emergent applications such as Smart Cities and other dynamic data stream based instruments. A persistent barrier to developing progress in this area has been the lack of a large-scale experimental platform where they can be explored.

Over the last year, the Chameleon project has built such a platform. The testbed, deployed at the University of Chicago and TACC, consists of almost 15,000 cores, 5PB of total disk space, and leverages 100 Gbps connection between the sites. While the hardware deployed so far consists primarily of homogenous hardware to support large-scale experiments, next year we will add high-memory, large-disk, low-power, GPU, and co-processor units. To support a broad range of experiments, the project provides a configuration system allowing full control of the software stack, from provisioning of bare metal and network interconnects to delivery of fully functioning cloud environments.

These capabilities were developed by combining OpenStack with Ironic for bare metal reconfiguration, Grid’5000’s resource representation, discovery, and verification mechanisms, and “special sauce” much of which consists of extensions to OpenStack. This talk will describe the goals, the building, and the existing and future capabilities of the testbed.

About CloudX: CloudX is a discussion group devoted to exploring synergies between activities within the lab relating to a group of recent innovations, currently known as cloud computing. You can join the mailing list at: https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/mailman/listinfo/cloudx