Open Cirrus Project Adds New Contributors, Increases Footprint

Open Cirrus, an open source test bed for advancing cloud computing based research, has attracted four new organizations including a telecommunications research group and several international members. China Mobile Research Institute (CMRI), the Supercomputing Center of Galicia (CESGA) in Spain, China Telecom’s Guangzhou Research Institute (GSTA), and Georgia Tech University’s Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) are the latest groups to join the Open Cirrus project that was launched by Intel, Yahoo and Hewlett Packard in July 2008. The news was made public the fourth Open Cirrus Summit hosted by Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh.

Here is where Open Cirrus project stands after today’s announcements.

• There are 14 global locations for the Open Cirrus project.
• The Open Cirrus test bed now includes centers of excellence at HP Labs, Intel Labs and Yahoo!, as well as the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Russian Academy of Sciences, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIMOS, a Malaysian research and development organization.
• There are 80 research projects that are currently running on the test bed.
• Carnegie Mellon University is using the test bed for stem cell research by combining cloud-based visual processing with a microscopic imaging system.
• HP s using Open Cirrus to build a cloud sustainability dashboard.
• Yahoo is using the test bed to understand the wisdom of the clouds.

Stacey first wrote about the project at the time of its launch. At that time there were only six locations for the test bed. At that time, there were between 1,000-to-4,000 HP servers running Apache Hadoop. The project competes for attention with Google’s attempts to woo the academic community.