The 2nd Industry/University Joint International Workshop on Data Center Automation, Analytics, and Control (DAAC)

Invited Talk: The Campus Compute Cooperative Project as an Alternative to Commercial Clouds

Authors: Andrew Grimshaw (University of Virginia)

Abstract: Wide-area, federated, compute-sharing systems (such as Condor, gLite, Globus, and Legion) have been around for over twenty years. Outside of particular domains such as physics, these systems have not been widely adopted. Recently, however, universities are starting to propose and join resource-sharing platforms. Why this sudden change?

Mostly, this change has come in response to cost concerns. HPC managers are under new pressure from university administrators who demand that infrastructure outlays be economically justified. "Why not just put it all on Amazon?" goes the administration's refrain. In response, HPC managers have begun to document the true cost of university-, department-, and research-group-owned infrastructure, thus enabling a legitimate cost comparison with Amazon or Azure. Additionally, it may be noted, this pressure to consider outsourcing computing infrastructure has legitimized both remote computing and paying for computation.

In this talk, I will briefly describe the Campus Compute Cooperative's (CCC). I will then detail both the results of our market simulations and the take-aways from interviews with stakeholders. By both of these measures, the CCC is valuable and viable: first, the simulation results clearly show the gains in institutional value; second, stakeholders indicated that many institutions are open to trading resources. Most promising, some institutions expressed interest in selling resources and others expressed willingness to pay.




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