Utilizing Open Source Cloud Computing Environments to Provide Cost Effective Support for University Education and Research

Abstract

This chapter describes an economical and scalable open source cloud computing technology suitable for a university environment where the need is to simultaneously serve a diverse spectrum of educational and research missions. In particular, this chapter reviews a cloud computing technology called Virtual Computing Lab (VCL, http://vcl.ncsu.edu). This open source technology was originally designed and built at North Carolina State University (NCSU), and its seamlessly supports both the electronic teaching and learning needs of the university as well as a robust environment for faculty high performance computing research needs. Extensive data from the NCSU VCL production system show the economic scalability of the solutions. The authors discuss economic viability of the solution and the trade-off analysis that needs to be done to understand how much of the equipment, virtualization, and workload balancing among on-demand and background workloads need to happen.