The world is populated with enormous amounts of data from a wide variety of sources. There is a compelling human need to represent, analyze, query, manage, understand, and respond to such data for knowledge extraction and decision making. In collaboration with Yahoo! and Hewlett-Packard, we are creating an experimental testbed, the Cloud Computing Testbed (CCT), at the University of Illinois (UIUC) for data-intensive applications using distributed "cloud" computational resources to enable researchers to address this need by processing data at various levels of the system stack, from network, operating system, virtual machines, and distributed applications to the Web. The exploratory nature of CCT results from its focus on systems and networking related research issues within a data-intensive cloud computing environment. Other existing or proposed data processing clusters are focused on user-level applications for which a stable and thus fairly rigid environment must be maintained, whereas the proposed research with the CCT will go deep into the system software stack to explore new and better ways to provide system-level support for data-intensive computing. The UIUC research efforts cover a breadth of research areas including networking, operating systems, virtual machines, distributed systems, data-mining, Web search, network measurements, and multimedia. Access to the CCT is also being made available to external CISE researchers by way of an application process administered by UIUC.
The CCT will provide the academic community with the opportunity to do research in data-intensive computing spanning multiple research areas (OS, virtual machines, distributed systems, datamining, the Web, and online social networks), and in particular to explore powerful systems and networking research topics in a data-intensive environment. It will give the academic community access to resources that would otherwise be unavailable due to cost. The CCT is providing opportunities for multi-disciplinary research on large-scale, distributed computing projects. It is accelerating research for Internet-scale computing and will drive innovation for future systems.
