The proposed planning activity seeks to undertake planning of the establishment of a new Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) site at Texas Tech University of the existing Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing. The center currently involves Arizona, Florida, Mississippi State and Rutgers, and industry and government partners in the field. The Texas Tech site intends to provide a practical work arena for development and coordination of standards, standards-based software and reference implementations applicable to cloud and other forms of advanced distributed computing. The site will fill a need to organize, classify, develop reference implementations for and otherwise contribute to standards-based software in advanced distributed computing.
The planned site, in combination with the existing center plans to help build innovation capacity in cloud computing. The outcomes from the Texas Tech site has the potential to support effective, broad-based standards development for this emerging field. The site plans to have a significant impact on students via mechanisms including the TTU STEM Education and Outreach Project and the SURAgrid regional grid and cloud computing educational dissemination project.
The National Science Foundation's Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC) Industry/University Cooperative Research Center added a new site specifically chartered to work on practical application and further development of standards for cloud computing. The misison of the CAC site at Texas Tech University (CAC@TTU) is to provide a practical and collaborative work arena for development and coordination of standards that are specifically applicable to cloud and other forms of advanced distributed computing. Areas of interest for the CAC@TTU research program include cloud-specific algorithms, implementations and development of standards for distributed and autonomic computing applications and paradigms for their rapid adoption in industry. The primary goal of the CAC@TTU in pursuing this program is to identify and foster industry-academia-government partnerships on topics directly related to emerging cloud infrastructures and standards, including issues related to security, performance, interoperability and workload portability across infrastructure boundaries. A secondary goal of the program is to identify and develop coordinated efforts to organize, classify, and develop reference implementations that showcase the benefits of cloud computing in areas of real-world applicability to business needs. A final goal is to create a trained workforce of capable students who can relate their domain expertise and advanced distributed and autonomic computing to current topical problems in the industry, and capable of sustaining the activities and opportunities created through the CAC effort. The CAC@TTU has attracted a rich mix of industry members ranging across the financial, health care information technology, and manufacturing sectors as well as participation from a US federal government agency. It is also engaged in a variety of outreach activities through community organizations to broaden the impact of cloud computing in areas of societal need. By launching this specific effort to improve the uptake and practical use of standards in cloud computing, NSF is taking steps that will improve the overall practicality of adoption of cloud computing to solve problems of strong societal and industry importance, and to smooth the use of cloud computing methods in real-world settings. Through the research and outreach of the CAC@TTU new site of the Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center will advance the state of the art in cloud computing and greatly expand training and awareness of cloud standards for problems of practical importance.
