The BU Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) hosted a workshop for IBM, Red Hat and Boston University (BU) on Cloud Computing topics on February 14, where we shared progress and results from many interesting projects.
The event covered design, prototyping and analysis work in four major areas:
- hybrid cloud
- cloud security
- cloud operations/analytics
- OS innovations
Red Hat Collaboratory students and researchers presented 11 project summaries covering all areas, with concentrations on OS innovations and operations/analytics. IBM students and researchers presented six talks, including an overview of all IBM Cloud Research by Tamar Eilam, a somewhat controversial talk on container security and how to measure it by James Bottomley, and two presentations on discovering software in the cloud from binaries and doing A/B testing on cloud deployed canary releases. IBM and Red Hat are both pursuing projects related to FPGA hardware augmentation for performance at multiple different points in processor, memory and network interfaces with BU collaborators. Red Hat’s work on creating open source libraries for generating FPGA netlists should be especially important to both groups’ ongoing FPGA work. Both IBM and Red Hat were also pursuing complementary work on unikernels with BU PhD students (Jim Cadden and Ali Raza).Two new BU faculty (Vasiliki Kalavri & John Liagouris) presented their work on streaming dataflows based on big data processing and how to manage and analyze stream traces. These faculty (and others) were interested in future collaborations with Red Hat and IBM. Based on the number and liveliness of discussions during workshop breaks and lunch, both IBM and Red Hat are interested in continued collaboration with BU and with each other to leverage our complementary strengths. Experimentation in the Massachusetts Open Cloud should be beneficial to all participants, and many were especially interested in the possibility of creating curated operational data sets, based on open MOC data. We expect follow-on discussions, so please share your interests and opinions on agenda topics.
