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News Announcement

Cornell receives NSF award to implement federated cloud software


Contact: Paul Redfern
Cell: (607) 227-1865

FOR RELEASE: April 16, 2018

ITHACA, NY – The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) announced that it received a $986,580 supplemental award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for "Adapting the Federated Cloud to New Software Environments."

Researchers are investigating OpenStack software environments and, based on their findings, implementing the most suitable OpenStack technologies as the software ecosystem for the Aristotle Cloud Federation, a multi-campus federated cloud deployed at Cornell, the University at Buffalo, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In addition, they will implement and deploy containerized application kernels in the Aristotle OpenStack environment and explore the use of Docker by Aristotle use case scientists in order to achieve a level of portability with public clouds. The strengths and limitations of containerized scientific codes with respect to function, performance, and portability will be assessed.

This investigation is benefiting from the Aristotle team’s extensive DevOps skills and multi-campus hybrid cloud experience.

The Aristotle Cloud Federation – https://federatedcloud.org/ – is supported by NSF grant ACI-1541215. Current industry collaborators include Amazon Web Services, Dell, Globus, HPE, and Red Hat. The principal investigator is David Lifka, Cornell’s vice president for information technologies and chief information officer, and director of CAC.