Universities Receive $5M Grant to Link Together Clouds
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $5M grant to researchers from 3 universities located all across America.
With the grant, the researchers will federate clouds from the University of Buffalo, Cornell and UC Santa Barbara.
The goal of the project is allow scientific research to happen across campus lines.
Other goals of the project being dubbed Aristotle Cloud Federation include the encouraging of universities to build their own federated clouds, or join the ACF.
The idea is starting to catch hold as these three universities will become the charter members of the project. Each of the universities have clouds built on the Eucalyptus platform.
Although Eucalyptus is rarely used in enterprise cloud deployments, the software is used within universities since it can be obtained through open source .
Eucalyptus, which was innovated by HP Enterprise, gives organizations the ability to build private federated clouds and convert them into hybrid clouds easily by utilizing the functionality of AWS.
In terms of doing academic research, Eucalyptus certainly gets the job done for the members of Aristotle Cloud Federation.
One of the biggest draws for this project is the project itself.
Since each university uses the cloud for different tasks, researchers will be able to study how each cloud works behind the scenes on each school’s individual services.
Another added benefit of the federation is storage. Since all data needs a home, by federating across multiple clouds, these universities cloud theoretically store data on the premises of another campus.
When scientists aren’t limited by computational restraints, the world can certainly begin to benefit from the resources derived from the research.
As more universities join the Aristotle Cloud Federation, the academic research arm of cloud computing will likely become stronger, which makes the next generation of cloud scientists that much more capable and able to deliver ground breaking innovations.
