Advancing cloud technologies – which support almost all modern computing – requires a sophisticated experimentation platform. This project aims to build a new version of this testbed and will expand access to it from a few large technology companies to general open-access users.

Every time you open a weather app, watch a video on Youtube, or search the internet for the best Thai food near you, you’re accessing and processing data with software stored on servers scattered around the world, a system referred to as “the cloud.” More than just changing consumer applications, cloud computing has impacted how research is conducted, allowing scientists to, essentially, rent the computers necessary to store and process massive amounts of data. But even using hundreds of powerful computers linked on the cloud, the calculations necessary to model complicated systems, like climate modelling or drug discovery, can take weeks, or even months, to run.
This project will construct and support a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud platforms—the underlying software which provides cloud services to applications. In providing capabilities that today are only available to researchers within a few large commercial cloud providers, it will allow diverse communities to exploit these technologies, democratizing cloud computing research, and allowing increased collaboration between the research and open source communities. The new testbed will combine proven software technologies with a real production cloud enhanced with programmable hardware – Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) – capabilities not present in other facilities available to researchers today.