EUCALYPTUS: An Open Source Service Infrastructure for Elastic Computing Research

July 30, 2008
Rick Wolski | University of California, Santa Barbara

Elastic Computing has emerged as a popular SLA-based utility computing paradigm that is has seen rapid uptake in the small-and-medium business e-commerce market place. First deployed by Amazon.com, a number of service hosting enterprises and technology providers have since developed “utility,” “cloud”, or “elastic” product and/or service offerings.

In this talk, we will present Eucalyptus – an open source implementation of cloud computing that is interface compatible with Amazon.com’s EC2. The talk will focus on the design, the implementation tradeoffs we have identified in implementing Eucalyptus as an exploratory tool, and the ways in which we have chosen to address these tradeoffs in the first version of the software. We will outline the design of EUCALYPTUS, discuss its architectural and administrative characteristics, and detail the degree to which it achieves the ability to implement elastic computing as a service overlay.

Speaker Details

Rich Wolski is a Professor in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Having received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Davis (while he held a full-time research position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) he has also held positions at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Tennessee. He is currently also a strategic advisor to the San Diego Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty member at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Wolski heads the Middleware and Applications Yielding Heterogeneous Environments for Metacomputing (MAYHEM) Laboratory which is responsible for several national scale research efforts in the area of high-performance distributed computing and grid computing. These efforts have resulted in nationally supported production-quality software tools such as the Network Weather Service (currently distributed as part of the NSF Middleware Initiative’s baseline software distribution) and a supported international user-community in addition to an extensive scholarly corpus. His most recent efforts have focused on both the implementation of nationally distributable tightly-coupled programs as well as the development of statistical predictive techniques for resource-constrained power usage, resource failure prediction, batch queue delay prediction, and cloud computing.