Portland State University Fourth Avenue Building (FAB) 150

Hakim Weatherspoon, Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Abstract: Cloud computing is often compared to the power utility model as part of a trend towards the commoditization of computing resources. However, today's cloud providers do not simply supply raw computing resources as a commodity, but also act as distributors, dictating cloud services that are not compatible across providers. In this talk, I will discuss a new cloud service distribution layer, called a Supercloud, that is completely decoupled from the cloud provider. A Supercloud give its users the illusion of their own homogenized private cloud (albeit, layered on top of one or more third-party providers). Under the hood, the Supercloud can include different hypervisors, hardware architectures, storage subsystems, and connectivity fabrics. Leveraging a nested paravirtualization layer called the Xen-Blanket, the Supercloud maintains the control necessary to implement hypervisor-level services and management. Using the Xen-Blanket to transform various cloud provider services into a unified offering, we have deployed a Supercloud across Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM, and Cornell University, and performed live VM migration between the different sites. Furthermore, Superclouds create opportunities to exploit resource management techniques that providers do not expose, like resource oversubscription, and ultimately can reduce costs for users.

Bio: Hakim Weatherspoon is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research interests cover various aspects of fault-tolerance, reliability, security, and performance of large Internet-scale systems such as cloud computing and distributed systems. Professor Weatherspoon received his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley and B.S. from University of Washington. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and recipient of an NSF CAREER award, DARPA Computer Science Study Panel (CSSP), IBM Faculty Award, the NetApp Faculty Fellowship, Intel Early Career Faculty Honor, and the Future Internet Architecture award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Host: Bryant York