New government bare-metal clouds to probe virtualization, IoT frontiers

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

We’ve only just begun to embrace the potential of cloud. As the so-called Internet of Things takes hold, cloud computing services will need to acquire a new depth and breadth to handle petabytes of data, demanding, complex applications, and millions of users. New, evolving architecture is needed. The National Science Foundation (NSF) wants to promote a new generation of applications, including real-time and safety-critical applications such as those used in medical devices, power grids, and transportation systems.

These are among the reasons NSF recently announced two $10 million projects to create cloud computing testbeds–to be called "Chameleon" and "CloudLab"– that will enable researchers to develop and experiment with, as they put it, "novel cloud architectures and pursue new, architecturally-enabled applications" of cloud computing. Ultimately, the goal of the NSFCloud program and the two new projects is to advance the field of cloud computing broadly, its promoters said…

Chameleon is a large-scale, reconfigurable experimental environment for cloud research, co-located at the University of Chicago and The University of Texas at Austin. Chameleon will consist of 650 cloud nodes with 5 petabytes of storage. The system will run on commodity processors, as well as a variety of network interconnects and storage devices. Researchers can mix-and-match hardware, software and networking components and test their performance…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/new-government-bare-metal-clouds-to-probe-virtualization-iot-frontiers-7000032897/