Open Cloud Consortium OCC
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The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC):

  1. supports the development of standards for cloud computing and frameworks for interoperating between clouds;
  2. supports the development of benchmarks for cloud computing;
  3. supports open source software for cloud computing;
  4. manages a testbed for cloud computing called the Open Cloud Testbed;
  5. sponsors workshops and other events related to cloud computing.

If you are interested in joining the Open Cloud Consortium, please send email to info at opencloudconsortium.org

What's New

  • November 20, 2008, Sector/Sphere and the Open Cloud Testbed win the SC 08 Bandwidth Challenge. The Open Cloud Consortium participated in an entry that consisted of several cloud applications running on the Open Cloud Testbed, which won the SC 08 Bandwidth Challenge. This included a terasort running on the Open Cloud Testbed that spanned the continental US and sustanined an average throughput of 4.8 Gb/s and a peak throughput of 10 Gb/s. Racks located in Chicago, Baltimore and San Diego were used in the entry.

  • November 17-20, 2008, SC 08. Several applications, benchmarks, and interoperability frameworks were demonstrated at SC 08 using the Open Cloud Testbed.

  • November, 2008, Thrift Interoperability Study. A study was completed that used Thrift to provide interoperability for storage clouds, including the Hadoop DFS and the Sector DFS.

  • October, 2008, Creditstone. The Open Cloud Consortium developed a preliminary version of a benchmark called Creditstone for benchmarking clouds that provide on-demand computing capacity. Creditstone includes code to generate synethetic credit card transactions.

  • October 22-23, 2008, CCA 08. The Open Cloud Consortium was one of the sponsors of conference Cloud Computing and its Applications (CCA 08) that took place in Chicago on 22 and 23, 2008. Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, gave the keynote.

  • September 15-16, 2008. The Open Cloud Testbed was part of the CENIC CalREN HPC/XD Workshop at Calit2 in La Jolla, California. Demonstrations involving Hadoop and Sector will be shown. As far as we know, this is the first public demonstration of a wide area cloud that uses upon wide area 10 Gb/s networks.

  • September 9, 2008. A benchmark using 58.5 billion synthetic credit card transactions was run on 117 nodes of the Open Cloud Testbed using racks located in Chicago, Baltimore and La Jolla. Version 0.17.2 of Hadoop and version 1.12 of Sector were used. Hadoop required 189 minutes and Sector required 71 minutes. Sector was about 2.5x times faster. The results were presented at the 2008 UK e-Science All Hands Meeting in Edinburgh.

  • September 8, 2008. Version 1.14 of Sector was released. This version of Sector provides a "MapReduce style" API. Sector still supports the ability to apply an arbitrary user-defined function (UDF) to the data it manages. We are currently exploring ways of implementing a common interface to different cloud services, such as Hadoop and Sector. If you are interested in participating, please let us know.

  • September 2, 2008. The Open Cloud Testbed was upgraded from 240 cores to 480 cores. We are currently planning to add additional sites to the Open Cloud Testbed. If you would like to join the testbed, please contact us.

  • August 26, 2008. A new benchmark using synthetic credit card data was developed and run on the Open Cloud Testbed. Experimental studies comparing version 0.17.2 of Hadoop and version 1.11 of Sector were presented at KDD 2008. In these tests, Sector was about 2.4 times as fast as Hadoop.

  • July 15, 2008. Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon will be giving the keynote talk at Cloud Computing and Applications 2008 (CCA 08) Workshop that will take place on October 22 and 23, 2008 in Chicago.

  • June 30, 2008. The June, 2008 status report for the Open Cloud Testbed and an overview of some preliminary benchmarks comparing Hadoop v0.17.0 and Sector v1.8 are available.

  • June 15, 2008. In initial testing using the Open Cloud Testbed, Sector performed about twice as fast as Hadoop as measured by the Terasort benchmark. Test were performed on 58 cores in a local area network; 116 cores in a metropolitan area 10 GE network; and 178 cores in a wide area 10 GE. These results will be presented at the upcoming KDD conference.

  • June 10, 2008. The Open Cloud Consortium is one of the sponsors of the Cloud Computing and Applications 2008 (CCA 08) Workshop that will take place on October 22 and 23, 2008 in Chicago. Extended abstracts are due by August 1, 2008.

  • June 2, 2008. The Open Cloud Testbed is up and available for initial testing. The testbed consists of four racks located in Chicago at StarLight, in Chicago at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in La Jolla at Calit2 (part of UCSD), and in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University. 10GE connectivity is provided by the Cisco C-Wave.