Cloud Computing: Possibilities and Practice A presentation of cloud computing techniques and applications Presented by technology professionals from Northeastern University, MIT, and Wheelock College. Copyright Greg Banwarth, Rick MicKool, and Justin Riley, This work is the intellectual property of the authors. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materials and notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author. Some images in this Powerpoint where taken from public web sites.

Speakers Rick Mickool, Executive Director & CTO, Information Services, Northeastern University Greg Banwarth, Director of Technology / CIO, Wheelock College Justin Riley, Programmer Analyst III, MIT

Northeastern University in the Cloud Why? How?

Northeastern University Private university founded 1898 in Boston, MA National interdisciplinary research university that is student-centered, practice-oriented and urban –25,000 applications nationally for 2,800 freshman seats –Major research initiatives: Technology development, economic growth, social progress, and health care. –18,000 FT and 5,500 PT students across 7 colleges and Law School –1,000 faculty, 3,000 support staff. Over 160,000 registered alumni –Top co-op school per US News & World Report –Focused on experiential learning —including co-op, student research, service learning, and global learning –Site of the first World Series in 1903 (Pittsburgh Pirates vs. Boston Red Sox * )

The Vision How do we deliver the same, personalized ‘campus experience’ to our customers wherever they are, whenever they want it, on whatever device is available? Residence Hall Classroom Home Staff Alumni Parents Mobile Device Where - branch locations, telecommuters, disconnected users, foreign countries What Faculty How Office Curricular Co-Curricular Extra-Curricular Students BrowserDesktopSet top Device Who Labs When 12:00 24:00

The Challenge – Data Centers

The Challenge – Variety of Devices

The Challenge – The Need to Integrate

How - Evolution Application Virtualization – Softricity/Microsoft Softgrid –Reduced application conflicts –Faster introduction and upgrade of applications Server Virtualization – VMware / AIX LPAR –Consolidated data center –Faster and higher availability of servers Terminal Services / Remote Desktop – Microsoft –NU On-DemandNU On-Demand Software as a Service

SaaS Experience Implemented Salesforce.com (SFDC) in 2006 Used for alumni development and contributor relations Previous experiences with ASP, managed and hosted solutions SFDC consultant - RAD development LDAP authentication / SFDC profiles Integration in 30 days and live in 90 days –Used CastIron integration “appliance” No local server and storage infrastructure

Next – Platform as a Service (PaaS)? * reference:

Next – Desktop as a Service? Desktop as a Service –MokaFive –Desktone –G.HO.ST

Considerations - Good or Bad? Rapid deployment - little infrastructure –Network connectivity –Authentication “Open” platform for development and integration –Web services / APIs –Lock-in Your data - their location & retention schedule? Security & Liability Licensing & Intellectual Property OpEx versus CapEx

My Final Thoughts May 2003, Nicholas Carr published “IT Doesn’t Matter” and highlighted IT as a utility Cloud computing services are evolving based on new and maturing grid and virtualization technologies Some cloud services can bring value today It is not ‘if” but “when” to use cloud services SOA & BPO focus The cloud will be an increasingly important contributor to delivering agile on-demand environments in the future – start your plan to plug-in now

Disaster Recovery On the Cloud Greg Banwarth Director of Technology / CIO

About Wheelock Approximately 900 undergraduate, 300 graduate students Consolidated campus in downtown Boston, graduate campus a ¼ mile away, off-campus programs in South Carolina and Singapore Technology department handles all technology services with a full time employee count of 5 –We are driven to new or innovative technologies to overcome resource issues while still providing full service to our faculty/staff/students.

Infrastructure 40 active servers (primarily Windows based) –ERP (Jenzabar), Mail (Exchange 2003), File Server, DNS, Web, etc. Main services (excluding ERP) are on a VMWare environment Backup options were non-enterprise –Backed up essential data to Iron Mountain “Live Vault”

Funding and Project Goals One time capital expense budget to develop an on and off-site comprehensive backup set –Funding came with requirement to save data out of state Identified Amazon’s S3 service as the most cost efficient (Approximately 75% cheaper than traditional co-location means) –How to get our data there?

Disaster Recovery Foundation On The Cloud Rolling out Zmanda as an Enterprise wide backup solution –Allows local disk and Amazon S3 storage –Full backup sets flow to on-site backup, ‘essential’ data continues onto the S3 cloud –Fully supported system (akin to Symantec) that takes programming off of department staff –Standard backup sets: saves as ZIP, TAR, etc.

Disaster Recovery: The Next Steps Essential data is on S3 – can we connect it to Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) service? (yes!) Setting up a suite of servers (Windows and Linux based) that are in use only when testing or during a disaster recovery scenario –For EC2 ‘CPU Instances’ that power the services, we pay 10 to 12.5 cents an hour for testing for each instance, can scale processes in a disaster Grab S3 backup data for a recent data set in a disaster scenario –Easy to manipulate/extract given standard ZIP and TAR formats

Obstacles and Potential Growth Obstacles (see consideration slide in NorthEastern section) We are currently focusing on: Licensing issues, IP addressing, ‘rooted services’ (Active Directory) Collaborative resources for effective Testing Potential Growth Cloud Bursting (via enomalism?) Full business crucial DR is possible... For less money than we were paying for existing (Live Vault) remote back-up storage

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers Cloud Computing in the Classroom Justin Riley Software Tools for Academics and Researchers Office of Educational Innovation and Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers Outline The STAR Group HPC Use-Cases in the Classroom Faculty Concerns Cloud Computing as a Solution Our Cloud Computing Experiences at MIT Converting Cloud Computing Configurations into Products (StarCluster)

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers The STAR Group What's your biggest problem bringing your research into the classroom?

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers HPC use-cases in the classroom Constantinos Evangelinos, PhD Researcher in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. (MIT) Parallel Programming Course: Parallel Programming for Multi-core Machines Using OpenMP and MPI

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers HPC use-cases in the classroom Markus Buehler, PhD Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering (MIT) Nicola Marzari, PhD Associate Professor in Computational Materials Science (MIT) Materials Modeling Courses: Introduction to Modeling and Simulation (undergraduate) Atomistic Computer Modeling of Materials (graduate)

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers Faculty Concerns Administrative overhead Teaching Assistants acting as volatile system admins What happens when TA's/Graduate Students graduate? Reliability of resource configurations Has the cluster changed since we've last used it? Does the software still work? Ability to scale with the number of students I need to accommodate X students but only have N resources I just need a few resources for a small class/demonstration. Resource Accessibility How do I give every student access to these resources? Do we make accounts for students on someone's cluster? How do these accounts change from year to year? Who manages student accounts?

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers Cloud Computing as a Solution Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) EC2 Features: Dynamically allocate/terminate Linux “virtual” machines Pay only for what you use (i.e. machine hours and data transfer) Capture software configurations into Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for later use. EBS Features: Highly available/reliable volumes that can be attached to a running EC2 machine (ie like plugging in a USB key to the machine). Allows you to create point-in-time snapshots of your data. S3 Features: Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. :

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers Our Experiences with Cloud Computing at MIT StarHPC - an on demand compute cluster for parallel programming with both OpenMP and OpenMPI technologies. It provides a virtual desktop environment, hosted on EC2, configured with all the necessary tools for programming in OpenMP/OpenMPI. StarMolsim - a web application used to run materials modeling research software. It enables the user to run various simulations on a distributed compute cluster and retrieve the results, all from a web browser.

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers StarHPC Use case: students have direct access to the cluster to actively develop parallel programs using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) StarHPC was used for 2 weeks in an Independent Activities Period (IAP) course for parallel programming using OpenMP and OpenMPI. Result: Creating a 4-node cluster for two weeks came out to about $25 per student using Amazon EC2. SSH/VNC Virtual Desktop Environment EC2 OpenMPI Cluster User

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers StarHPC Using EC2 allowed us to fully automate: Launching new nodes (or instances) Generating user accounts/passwords Configuring passwordless ssh access between the nodes for each user (a strict requirement for OpenMPI) Generating example OpenMP/OpenMPI projects in Eclipse and Netbeans that are immediately available to the user and will run on the spot. Customizing desktop configurations with easy links/menus to the parallel programming development environments All at the press of a button!

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers StarMolsim Use case: students log in to a web application as a proxy to the computing resources. The web application handles communicating with the cluster to submit jobs, retrieve the results, etc. Result: EC2 is being used to replace a traditional 9-node HPC cluster for ~3 months in the Intro to Modeling and Simulation course at MIT. Depending on the instance type and data transfer, the cost for using the 9 node EC2 cluster for the semester is around $2,000-4,000. User EC2 OpenMPI Cluster Web Server hosting GenePattern from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers StarMolsim Using EC2/EBS allowed us to fully automate: Launching new nodes (or instances) Configuring passwordless ssh between nodes Setting up network file system for shared folders (NFS) Configuring Sun Grid Engine Attaching the software needed for the course using EBS Creating backups via EBS point-in-time snapshotting Providing cluster usage statistics to the user via a web interface All at the press of a button!

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers StarCluster StarCluster is a utility for creating and managing general purpose compute clusters hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). StarCluster makes it easy for a user to create their own compute cluster on EC2 and pay only for what they use. Software included in the virtual machine: OpenMPI NFS'd /home directory Sun Grid Engine Compilers for installing your own custom software Linux OS with package manager for installing additional OS software StarCluster Dependencies: Registered and fully configured EC2 account. Python 2.4+ Paramiko library for Python

Software Tools for Academics and Researchers Acknowledgements Professor Buehler (MIT) Professor Marzari (MIT) Constantinos Evangelinos (MIT) Broad Institute (MIT and Harvard)

Questions? Thank you Greg Banwarth, Rick Mickool, Justin Riley,