Earlier this week Jack Brassil and I co-organized an NSF-supported workshop on next-generation cloud research infrastructure (RI) in Princeton, NJ. The focus of the workshop was on the role of cloud on research and education, how needs are changing, and how cloud infrastructure should evolve to keep up with the changing needs. We had about 60 experts who builds and manages a variety of research infrastructure and uses those infrastructure for a variety of research activities beyond CS. It’s been an eye-opening experience for me, especially given that, over the years, I have used many of the testbeds built and managed by our attendees without ever meeting or knowing them.

The workshop itself was divided into multiple plenary and breakout sessions, where we heard from cloud RI operators, commercial cloud operators, cloud users in both CS and basic science domains. We also discussed the state-of-the-art in cloud RI, needs of existing and future experiments, and how to effectively fulfill those needs by combining RI and commercial clouds. Naturally, wide-area or federated computing as well as advances in hardware (e.g., accelerators, disaggregation) were at the forefront of our discussions. We also spent quite some time discussing the role of cloud in education, how to make cloud computing accessible to under-served minorities via federal-funded testbeds, and the role of cloud for institutions focusing on those communities. It was a very different crowd than I am used to, but a great experience overall.

I’d like to thank Jack for inviting me to co-organize with me, Srini Seshan (CMU) and Terry Benzel (USC) for steering our efforts, NSF and especially Deep Medhi for supporting this workshop, Jen Rexford for supporting us, and of course, all our attendees who traveled from far-flung places to make it successful. Soon, we will have a report summarizing our findings from this workshop, which I hope will help guide future agenda in cloud research infrastructure, both public and commercial.