NCloud - Experimenting with Architecting and Facilitating Utility Services for Establishing Educational Cloud

Abstract

Academic Institutions as well as Enterprises all over the globe have become heavily dependent on high performance computing systems for their day to day activities and hence it continues to seek opportunities to rationalize and optimize the utilization of resources. Continuous upgradations of software and hardware have become important items of those organizations meetings creating budget pressure. In such scenario, Cloud computing services could provide many of those organizations to enhance the productivity keeping the budget expenditure low. The paper discusses the experiments carried out on our educational campus for architecting the cloud – hereafter referred as NCloud (Cloud built on Nirma Campus), configured using open source tools and furnishes the utility services which are leading towards an establishment of a stepping stone for formation of knowledge cloud. Testbed formed for data center consists of 1 front-end and 16 worker node. By using NCloud, user will be able to fulfill the demand of infrastructure as a service in which user is provided an operating system with specific RAM and CPU cores. Utility oriented services in NCloud aims to charge user for what they use. For implementing utility oriented services, analysis of various major cloud providers is done including pricing models. Performance measures on heterogeneous platforms and the results obtained are included in the paper.