UTSA will participate at OpenStack® Open Source Cloud Community April 25-29

UTSA students at the UTSA Open Cloud Institute.

(April 25, 2016) -- With attendees from more than 50 countries, the OpenStack® open source cloud community is gathering in Austin, April 25-29 to share how the cloud computing has transformed their businesses and institutions. More than 7,000 participants are expected to attend.

UTSA will be well-represented by members of the Open Cloud Institute (OCI), the Colleges of Engineering and Sciences and the Office for Research: Mauli Agrawal, VP for Research; Bernard Arulanandam, AVP for Research Support; Rajendra Boppana, Chair, Computer Science; JoAnn Browning, Dean, College of Engineering; Harry Millwater, Associate Dean, College of Engineering; Paul Rad, Chief Research Officer, OCI; and Jeff Prevost, Chief Research Officer, OCI. The Open Cloud Institute will be leading the Open Science Cloud initiatives at the Austin summit.

Research fellows and staff from the Open Cloud Institute will also be operating an onsite booth funded by the National Science Foundation and the Chameleon Cloud research grant, highlighting two key UTSA cloud research initiatives.

NSF Jetstream Project:
In January 2015, UTSA and partner Indiana University received a $6.6 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to build cloud-based advanced computing systems for the science and engineering community.

Chameleon Cloud:
Back in September 2014, UTSA, along with its partners institutions — The University of Chicago, The Ohio State University, Northwestern University, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin — received a $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to create a cloud-computing testbed that allows researchers develop and experiment with new cloud architectures and applications. The NSFCloud project, based at the University of Chicago and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (UT-Austin), supports the design, deployment and initial operation of Chameleon, a large-scale testbed consisting of 650 cloud nodes and five petabytes of storage.

Both projects will be featured at the Open Cloud Institute’s booth and lounge area, which includes live demonstrations and slide presentations. There will be a demonstration of the cloud e-lab certification platform focusing on cloud workforce development – one of the OCI’s sustainability pillars – running on Chameleon.

Scientific Working Group
In response to the demands of the research community, the OpenStack Foundation has set up a Scientific Working Group that will have its inaugural meeting at the summit. The program also includes several panels sessions and networking opportunities for academics, researchers, scientists and research computing professionals to discuss a wide range of topics. UTSA faculty and research partners will also participate in panel discussions.

One of the most anticipated panel discussion of the summit, UTSA’s Paul Rad will present along with science cloud directors from CERN (Switzerland), NeCTAR (Australia), and Cambridge University (UK). They represent the largest community-driven clouds for collaborative research on the planet, responsible for a quarter million cores worldwide. This panel will bring key academic cloud stakeholders to focus on the requirements of this community, and next steps.

“Cloud computing represents one of the most significant shifts in information technology many of us are likely to see in our lifetimes. The massive scale and global availability of cloud-based services have spawned an entirely new generation of services that for practical purposes had been well out of reach for individual institutions and researchers. In effect, this necessary sharing of services has the consequence of bringing researchers previously working in isolated islands of activity into close proximity to one another and opening the doors to new levels of interaction and collaboration,” said Paul Rad, Chief Research Officer at UTSA’s Open Cloud Institute.

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