The past few years have seen a tremendous growth of massive computing resources and storage capacities in large data centers enabling new Internet applications and services. At the same time, there has been a rapid growth and widespread adoption of smart phones, tablets, and e-readers, through which users access these applications and services on the move. The confluence of these complementary trends has given rise to the emerging notions of mobile services and cloud computing. However, current mobile services and cloud computing offerings pose many difficult challenges to realize their full potential. These challenges include lack of user control over computing resources, poor performance and lack of context due to the separation between user devices and cloud resources, and limited privacy provided by centralized clouds. These challenges raise important questions such as: Can we build large-scale, ?community-based?, customizable cloud computing infrastructures by leveraging computing and storage resources contributed by a large number of small players? Can we develop personalized and collaborative Internet cloud services and mobile apps that enable user control, while tapping into existing cloud computing infrastructures? What applications can be run effectively on each type of cloud, and how could such clouds be coupled to yield a much more powerful platform? How can we fully realize the potential of mobile and cloud computing while minimizing its carbon footprint?
The PIs at the University of Minnesota (UMN) are conducting a wide range of research on addressing these challenges, by building an integrated cloud system that is diverse and dispersed across a wide area of locations; it not only utilizes the commercial large-scale cloud infrastructures, but also leverages smaller-scale, local community resources at the edge. A significant barrier to continued progress in these research efforts is lack of a flexible and controllable computing, storage and networking infrastructure for experimentation. This project seeks to overcome this obstacle by building the Minnesota Integrated cloud Systems Testbed (MiST) research infrastructure for advancing research on cloud computing infrastructures and applications. This research facility is organized in three interconnected logical tiers: i) core cloud systems consisting of two data centers; ii) several distributed edge server clouds consisting of a few server machines; and iii) swarms of stationary and mobile users, comprising a wide array of different user devices.
In terms of education, this research infrastructure provides an ideal "hands-on" learning environment to teach both graduate and undergraduate students important data analysis, system building and experimental skills that are critical for today's IT workforce. The PIs incorporate research conducted on the MiST research infrastructure in their classroom teaching, both for class projects in the core courses on networking, security, storage, and distributed systems, as well as in undergraduate senior and directed research courses. The PIs have a strong track-record of supporting undergraduate students, especially women and under-represented students. The PIs plan to disseminate the research advances via close interaction with their industrial collaborators, and through publications, presentations and public release of research data, software tools and prototype systems to the larger research community.
