Cloud Computing

Bill Turnbull

Associate CIO for Advanced Technology and Systems Integration

Department of Energy

August 27, 2009 2

Outline

• Federal Perspective– GSA role

• DOE– Administrative Use– Research

• Other Agencies

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Federal Perspective - OMB

• Analytical Perspectives, FY2010, Chapter 9, p.158:– The Federal Government will transform its Information

Technology Infrastructure by virtualizing data centers, consolidating data centers and operations, and ultimately adopting a cloud-computing business model. Initial pilots conducted in collaboration with Federal agencies will serve as test beds to demonstrate capabilities, including appropriate security and privacy protection at or exceeding current best practices, developing standards, gathering data, and benchmarking costs and performance.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2010/assets/crosscutting.pdf

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Federal Perspective – CIO Council

• Federal CIO Council Cloud Computing WG– Definition (NIST)– Principles– Industry Summit– Exec. Steering Committee/Advisory

Committee

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Fed. Perspective - Definition

• Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models.

• Characteristics– On-demand self-service– Ubiquitious network access– Location independent resource pooling– Rapid elasticity– Measured service

• Delivery Models: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS

• Deployment Models– Private Cloud– Community Cloud– Public Cloud– Hybrid Cloud

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Fed. Perspective - Principles

• Efficiency– identify and use excess capacity – cost-effective procurement of commodity services – reduce power usage and environmental footprint

• Agility – rapid deployment – ability to quickly respond to changing needs – ability to scale according to demand

• Security – implement controls to ensure appropriate security – privacy - appropriately protect personal information

• Accountability – measuring and improving service, cost, and performance – make data and services more easily available to the public

• Savings – up-front investments for future savings

August 27, 2009 7

Fed. Perspective – Industry Summit

• Top 5 vendor issues:– Security issues need to be resolved with each

individual provider– Modification to several contracting/purchase vehicles

to facilitate the purchase of cloud services – Long lead times for Federal opportunities. – Cost models are aggressive, but may not have an

accurate cost model– Improve notification of federal opportunities so that

they are easier to find for vendor community.

• No show-stoppers

August 27, 2009 8

Fed. Perspective – Future Organization

• Cloud Computing WG Cloud Computing Executive Steering Committee

• Cloud Computing Advisory Council

August 27, 2009 9

Clouds at GSA

• Hosts PMO

• Setting up store front

• RFQ out for IaaS– Award by end of FY 2009

• Hosts PMO

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Clouds in DOE

• Administrative Steps

• Research on Clouds

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DOE Approach

• Understand range of services, architectures, and policy issues

• Gain experience in cloud technologies, services, costs and risks

• Assess opportunities

• Pilot select apps/services

• Move to clouds where cost-effective

August 27, 2009 12

DOE – CIO

• Over 800 applications in 2 data centers– Virtualized Computing– Virtualized Storage

• Looking to pilot web hosting using GSA store front

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DOE – Lab Administration

• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory– Backup & restore –

exploring S3– Google Apps

• Group Collaboration Platform• Collaborative authoring• Chat• E-mail with LBL authentication

Philosophy Check:Supports external collaborators trivially.Makes cutting edge tools available to LBL researchers.Gets IT out of the business of duplicating commodity services.

Not free/open source.Lock in is very much a possibility.

Privacy/Security is different (better in some ways, worse in others).

August 27, 2009 14

DOE – Lab Administration

• Argonne National Laboratory• Primary focus on email & calendaring

• 3 Phases• Phase0: formulation, planning, procurement, etc…• Phase1: internal shakedown, 10’s of users• Phase2: single organization, 50-100

• Currently in Phase0, Phase1 t0= Sept 1

• ~ 3 month duration

– Other pilots• Framework (Force.com, App Engine), Oct 2009• Portals – early investigation

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DOE Labs - Research

• LBL– Testing EC2

– Uses all cores on 8-core nodes– Code not latency sensitive

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• Uses 32 cores on 4 nodes

• Code is latency-sensitive

DOE Labs - Research

performance >10x worse

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DOE Labs - Research

• ANL– Context Broker – provisions multiple cores

with consistent image and context on Amazon EC2

• Works with highly parallel applications

August 27, 2009 18

DOE Labs - Research

• EC2 Observations Relatively easy to duplicate ‘our’ cluster environment

• EC2 slow-down factor varies by application– hard to generalize about the cost of EC2– latency-sensitive codes perform poorly

• EC2 might be cost-effective for institutions that:– have latency-insensitive workload

– have limited data center capacity

– have bursty or deadline-driven work

– can use EC2 to accelerate time-to-answer

August 27, 2009 19

DOE Labs – Future Research

• Magellan– R&D effort to establish a nation-wide scientific mid-

range distributed computing and data analysis testbed.

• 2 sites: LBL/NERSC and ANL/ALCF• Compute: 10’s of teraflops • Storage: multiple petabytes• One C&A at low; one at moderate

– Expected Outcomes:• Can clouds improve wall clock turn around time• Ease of use, particularly across multiple sites• Promote open interface specifications for clouds

August 27, 2009 20

Other Clouds

• DISA– PaaS– 1 rack compute; 1 rack storage

• NASA– Nebula

• 4000 processors• Mostly open source