Open Cloud Consortium Wins Bandwidth Challenge at SC09 Conference in Portland, Oregon

December 8, 2009 Chicago -- At the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC09), a research team led by the Open Cloud Consortium won the Bandwidth Challenge competition for new technology to support data intensive applications over wide area clouds. In addition, the Open Cloud Consortium won in the Best Overall category of the SC 09 Bandwidth Challenge.

In addition to the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), the research team included the Laboratory for Advanced Computing (LAC) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University, and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).

The team demonstrated three data intensive applications, each showing how such applications could span geographically distributed data centers when supported by the appropriate hardware and software infrastructure. The demonstration was based on four high performance data centers located in Chicago, Baltimore and San Diego and interconnected at the StarLight communications exchange by wide area 10 Gb/s networks using lightpaths provided through a partnership with the National Lambda Rail (NLR) and Cisco Systems, Inc.

The first application used the OCC's Open Cloud Testbed to process very large datasets over 256 servers in 4 data centers connected by wide area high performance networks. Data was exchanged at over 100Gb/s among the participating nodes. This application used a new version (version 1.24) of the open source software Sector/Sphere large data cloud, which was developed by Laboratory for Advanced Computing. A protocol called UDT (also developed by the Laboratory for Advanced Computing) is used by Sector/Sphere to achieve high performance, even over clouds that are distributed.

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About the Open Cloud Consortium

The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a not-for-profit organization that: supports the development of standards for cloud computing and frameworks for interoperating between clouds; develops benchmarks for cloud computing; supports reference implementations for cloud computing; manages a testbed for cloud computing called the Open Cloud Testbed; and, sponsors workshops and other events related to cloud computing. (www.opencloudconsortium.org)