CampusCloud: Aggregating Universities

Computing Resources in Ad-Hoc Clouds

Hany H Ammar
1,5
,

Alaa Hamouda
2
, Mustafa Gamal
3
, Walid Abdelmoez
4
, Ahmed Moussa
5


1
The Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, USA
2
Computer Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Alazhar University, Cairo, Egypt
3
MOVE-IT Company, Cairo, Egypt
4
Arab Academy of Science and Technology, Egypt
5
Computer Science Department, Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, Egypt

Abstract Cloud Computing has recently emerged as a new
computing paradigm based on the concept of virtualization
with the goal of creating a shared and highly scalable
computing infrastructure from aggregated physical resources
to deliver seamless and on-demand provisioning of software,
hardware, and data as services. Universities typically have
large amounts of computing resources to support instructional
and research activities. This paper investigates the challenges
of developing a Campus Cloud based on aggregating resources
in multiple universities. The requirements model and the
architecture model of this cloud environment are presented.
An implementation methodology using open source cloud
middleware is also discussed.
Keywords- Cloud Computing; Software Engineering; Grid
Computing; High Performance Computing
I. INTRODUCTION
Resource availability is a key factor to achieve prosperity
of any society, and particularly important are computing
resources, which are needed in many applications, such as e-
learning, e-banking, e-business, and e-government. In
particular to allow for faster economic growth, computing
infrastructure is essential for small companies in their
typical day-to-day business and in research and development
activities. However, to attain their full potential, computing
resources need to be efficiently utilized in an aggregated
manner.
Cloud Computing has recently emerged as a new
computing paradigm. The Cloud is a type of parallel and
distributed computing designed to scale and share computing
resources among multiple consumers. This yields improved
utilization rates, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle [1].
Deploying applications on a Cloud can help to
achieve scalability and simplify/optimize IT environments.
A variety of challenges arise when deploying and operating
applications and services on a Cloud. Some examples of
such challenges are: how to manage and guarantee service
level agreements (SLAs) of services deployed in the Cloud;
how to integrate services deployed on-premise and on
different Clouds; how to deploy applications and business
processes and monitor their runtime status, among others [2,
3].
Universities typically have large amounts of
computing resources to support instructional and research
activities. These are dispersed in instruction/research
laboratories and administration offices in most university
faculties. Moreover, the university campus has a reasonable
level of computer network connectivity among almost all
university buildings and to the Internet. However, these
resources are underutilized; for instance, most computer labs
are expectedly used only during instruction sessions, which
span a small fraction of their asset time, and often are used
for simple applications that consume a small fraction of their
computing power. Taking into consideration that computer
manufacturing technology advances in a fast pace, and
todays computers are most likely going to be replaced
within three to four years, there is a dire need to make full
utilization of the available computing resources before their
asset time ends.
Several projects were conducted in the past years to
develop campus grids. One Example of a campus grid is the
University of Virginia Campus Grid (UVaCG) [8]. The grid
has been designed explicitly to re-use as much existing
infrastructure in the campus environment as possible in
creating a grid based on the Web Services Resource
Framework (WSRF). Another example of a campus grid is
CamGrid at Cambridge University [9]. Cam-Grid is a
distributed computing resource based on the Condor
middleware [9]. Yet another example of a campus grid that
was also developed using the Condor middleware is Oxford
University campus grid named OXGrid [10]. The design of
the OxGrid system is such that registered users have
seamless access to a variety of computational and data
storage resources around the university.
This paper investigates the challenges of developing a
Campus Cloud based on aggregating resources in multiple
universities. Section II discusses the requirements model
while section III presents the architecture model of the
campus cloud environment. The proposed system design is
ICCIT 2012 273
illustrated in section IV and then the implementation
methodology is discussed in section V. Finally, conclusion
and future work is provided in section VI.
II. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
This section describes Campus Cloud requirements to
show the benefit and the impact of this work to the
community. The requirement focuses on the basic use cases
that can be provided with the first release of Campus Cloud.
First subsection describes different cloud service. Then, in
the next section, the paper goes in more details about
campus cloud use cases and their relation to these models.
A. Cloud Service Models
Cloud service models define the highest abstract level of
cloud usage. The NIST [4] definition of cloud computing
defines three delivery models. Each of these deliver model
has its use case:
Software as a Service (SaaS): The consumer uses an
applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The
applications are accessible from various client
devices through either a thin client interface, such as
a web browser or a program interface. The consumer
does not manage or control the underlying cloud
infrastructure including network, servers, operating
systems, storage, or even individual application
capabilities, with the possible exception of limited
user-specific application configuration settings.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): The capability
provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud
infrastructure consumer-created or acquired
applications created using programming languages,
libraries, services, and tools supported by the
provider. The consumer does not manage or control
the underlying cloud infrastructure including
network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but
has control over the deployed applications and
possibly configuration settings for the application-
hosting environment.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The capability
provided to the consumer is to provision processing,
storage, networks, and other fundamental computing
resources where the consumer is able to deploy and
run arbitrary software, which can include operating
systems and applications. The consumer does not
manage or control the underlying cloud
infrastructure but has control over operating
systems, storage, and deployed applications; and
possibly limited control of select networking
components
Each of these types of delivery models has its use cases
as it will be described later in this section. Also there is a use
cases related to the deployment model of the cloud. The
following are different Cloud Deployment Models based on
NIST definition:
Private cloud: The cloud infrastructure is
provisioned for exclusive use by a single
organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g.,
business units). It may be owned, managed, and
operated by the organization, a third party, or some
combination of them, and it may exist on or off
premises.
Public cloud: The cloud infrastructure is
provisioned for open use by the general public. It
may be owned, managed, and operated by a
business, academic, or government organization, or
some combination of them. It exists on the premises
of the cloud provider.
Community cloud: The cloud infrastructure is
provisioned for exclusive use by a specific
community of consumers from organizations that
have shared concerns (e.g., mission, security
requirements, policy, and compliance
considerations). It may be owned, managed, and
operated by one or more of the organizations in the
community, a third party, or some combination of
them, and it may exist on or off premises.
Hybrid cloud: The cloud infrastructure is a
composition of two or more distinct cloud
infrastructures (private, community, or public) that
remain unique entities, but are bound together by
standardized or proprietary technology that enables
data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting
for load balancing between clouds).
Campus Cloud can be considered as Public Cloud. Also
Campus Cloud can be applied in more than one university
and collaborate with each other in a form of Hyper cloud or
community cloud.
Next subsection describes Campus Cloud users and
different usage scenarios in a form of Use Cases.
B. Campus Cloud Use Cases
Cloud Users can be End User, Researchers, Software
Developer, Enterprise Application or Another Cloud.
Campus Cloud can provide services for all of these types of
users. The following are more details of each user type.
1) End User
Cloud Service SaaS model is best fit for end user, where
the user focus on service provided to satisfy his needs
without high technical skills to use these services. End user
can be Home User or Faculty member (Student or
Instructor).
Home users are users whom use cloud from home to
view their emails, facebook or any other internet
activities. Campus Cloud can provide them an
opportunity to share files by providing them storage
and portal to upload and download files.
Faculty Members: Campus Cloud can be used to
host Learning Management System (LMS) that can
be used to upload Teaching materials including
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videos and files. Also campus cloud can host student
lab applications such as Matlab, PSPICE, Java,
etc.
2) Researchers
Many of researches uses computer to solve their
problems. Many of these researches need high computational
power specially researches that are based on simulation
techniques. Researchers can use Campus Cloud to allocate
more Computation Power and storage to execute their
research applications. By leveraging a student lab with 31
computers, we were able to produce results in two weeks
that would have taken an entire year on a single CPU.
Also they can conduct researches related to Cloud
Computing itself. Researchers need more access to cloud
infrastructure. Researcher uses the cloud services in all of its
models as follow:
IaaS model to control allocating more Virtual
machines and control their usage.
PaaS model to develop applications and deploy them
to the cloud such as Matlab applications.
SaaS model to use cloud as file server, and use other
cloud SaaS services such as using email server
functions.
3) Software Developer
Software Developer uses cloud mainly in PaaS cloud
service model. Use cases for Software developers can be as
follow:
SaaS development framework: it should provide
multi tenancy support. Also handle Data-store for
their applications.
Deploy a developed application
Test environment to test their application on the
cloud before releasing it.
Version Management to manage different versions
of their applications.
Database host
Allocate - de-allocate More resources
Uploading, deploying starting, stopping, restarting,
and deleting images.
Development tools
Application Programming Interface to access all
previous service from code.
4) Enterprise Applications
Cloud can be used for business in its three service
models. Use cases for enterprise are as follow:
Use cloud huge storage to store and share their files.
Enterprise Applications can use cloud services to
store and share data and files through cloud API.
Enterprise Applications integrate with some
modules over the cloud.
Part or all of Enterprise Application can be hosted or
deployed in the cloud.
5) Another Cloud
Clouds can provide services for each other through a
collaboration interface. Use Cases for Cloud to use another
cloud:
Acquire computation power from campus cloud on
their peak time.
Acquire more storage from campus cloud.
Figure 1 summarizes Campus Clouds main use cases.

Figure 1: Campus Cloud Use Cases
III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
To satisfy the system requirements, the general architecture
of the campus cloud system, as in Figure 2, includes three
layers; Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a
Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
IaaS delivers computer infrastructure typically a
platform virtualization environment as a service, along
with raw (block) storage and networking. Rather than
purchasing servers, software, data-center space or network
equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully
outsourced service. Section 2-a discusses the design of the
IaaS in the Campus Cloud.
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PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of
applications without the cost and complexity of buying and
managing the underlying hardware and software and
provisioning hosting capabilities, providing all of the
facilities required to support the complete life cycle of
building and delivering web applications and services
entirely available from the Internet. PaaS offerings may
include facilities for application design, application
development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as
application services such as team collaboration, web service
integration, database integration, security, scalability,
storage, persistence, state management, application
versioning, application instrumentation and developer
community facilitation. These services may be provisioned
as an integrated solution over the web. Section 2-B
discusses the design of the PaaS in the Campus Cloud.
SaaS is a software delivery model in which
software and its associated data are hosted centrally and are
typically accessed by users using a thin client, normally
using a web browser over the Internet. SaaS has become a
common delivery model for most business applications,
including accounting, collaboration, customer relationship
management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP),
invoicing, human resource management (HRM), content
management (CM) and service desk management. SaaS has
been incorporated into the strategy of all leading enterprise
software companies. It also may include some components
like exception handling, logging, data validation, and
billing. Section 2-C discusses the design of the SaaS in the
Campus Cloud.

Figure 2: Overall System Architecture
IV. SYSTEM DESIGN
We propose the details of the system design in the three
layers, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS as follows:
A. IAAS DESIGN
In this section we describe the design of the lowest
layer of Campus Cloud that provides the architecture design
of the IaaS layer. The design of Campus Cloud can be
developed using the open source framework defined by the
RESERVOIR Project [5]. This project is funded by the FP7
program of the European Union to develop a framework for
IaaS cloud service providers.
We start first by describing the architecture of
OpenNebula (ON) [6] open source cloud middleware that
provides a virtualized execution environment manager of
the virtualized resources in the RESERVIOR framework.
Figure 3 shows the architecture of ON and the application
programming interfaces (APIs) provided. In order to
support hybrid cloud environments consisting of private and
public clouds, ON implements the functionality supported
by the Amazons EC2 API [5], mainly those related to
virtual machine management. It also supports the Open
Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) that provides a remote
management API for IaaS model based services. OCCI can
be used also to serve the PaaS and SaaS layers of the cloud
computing architecture.
The ON Cloud API (OCA) provides an interface to the
core components of ON and it is used to develop advanced
IaaS tools using Java or Ruby. The ON core interacts with
the physical infrastructure via drivers for storage,
monitoring, virtualization, and authentication. A persistent
data-base is used to save the state information of ON as well
as other accounting information

Figure 3: OpenNebula Architecture and APIs [7]

The RESERVOIR framework provides a layer
above ON, namely Claudia, for service providers to
manage the IaaS services. The components of this layer
are shown in figure 4.
The Dashboard provides a web GUI to manage the
cloud. The monitoring component stores and distributes
the status of the services. The lifecycle manager controls
the deployment and dynamic scalability processes of the
services. The scalability and optimization manager
dynamically drives he configuration and scalability of
services. Figure 5 shows the overall RESERVIO
framework that combines both ON and Claudia. Service
Provides can access the service manager
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Figure 4: The Claudia Service manager Architecture [6]

Figure 5: The RESERVOIR Framework [6]

ON and OCCI can be used by researchers and developers
to satisfy the use cases mentioned in Requirement section
related to IaaS needs, where both researchers and developers
can allocate and de-allocate resources. As shown in figure 4,
OCCI Layer satisfies use cases related to interfacing with
another clouds.
B. PAAS DESIGN
To satisfy the system requirements of the
developer and researcher, we propose AppScale as a PaaS
framework. It is an open-source framework for running
Google App Engine applications. It is an implementation of
a cloud computing PaaS platform, supporting Xen, KVM,
Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus. It has been developed and is
maintained by the RACELab at UC Santa Barbara [8].
AppScale allows users to upload multiple App Engine
applications to a cloud. It supports multiple distributed
backends such as HBase, Hypertable, Apache Cassandra,
MySQL Cluster, and Redis. It has support for Python, Go,
and Java applications, taking the open source SDK provided
by Google App Engine and implementing scalable services
such as the datastore, memcache, blobstore, user's API, and
channel API.
C. SAAS DESIGN
Several platforms are now emerging to support
SaaS development. Oracle provides 'Oracle SaaS Platform',
which utilizes Oracles products. Google App Engine,
Microsoft and Amazon are also offering development
environments for cloud computing and also there are other
platforms like Heroku and 10gen [2]. SaaS services main
customers are small and medium enterprises over the world.
While these platforms do a good job in hiding many of the
infrastructure problems from the application developers,
they still lack many features that SaaS application
developers need form a platform. Mainly:
1. Interoperability. Almost all offerings lack a standard
method of accessing different services and hence
applications coded against one platform would not work on
the other and causes platform lock-in. Standardization is
needed in many ways.
2. Ready-made components. Many SaaS applications
require features like account activity tracking, action
logging, security management and much more. While these
can be implemented on the application level it makes more
sense to provide them as platform components along with
any other utilities that could be shared by many
applications.
3. Openness. Most of the current solutions are closed
source. A real achievement will be in defining a platform
that any data center (given certain requirements) can
implement and deploy with relative ease. A platform that
open source developers can contribute to or easily take into
account when building systems is needed.
Due to all of that, we propose developing a SaaS platform
that provides special services (APIs) to the SaaS
applications. Examples of these services are logging,
exception handling, and data binding and validation.
Business services like billing and UI Design can be
provided in a higher layer as shown in figure 6.

Figure 6: SaaS Framework

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V. IMPLEMENTATION METHODOLOGY
In this section we outline our implementation
methodology briefly. We adopt a bottom up approach where
we identify the physical resource layer first based on
available clusters in the different collaborating institutions.
We propose to start first with resources that have been
aggregated into clusters in the collaborating institutions. For
example, a model for exploiting resource aggregation to
build higher computational power has already been built at
the Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo
University. HiPer-FC is the High Performance Computing
Laboratory of the Faculty of Computers and Information at
Cairo University. This is a project for building High
Performance Computing systems based on Linux clusters
for use in research and education. It is also intended to be
used for testing Cloud Computing middleware and software
solutions. The latest incarnation of the project is a 2-clusters
grid consisting of 12 single-cores cluster and a 14 nodes
multi-core cluster of 5 Quad core machines and 9 dual core
machines for a total of 38 processors on the second cluster.
The overall computing power of the grid of 2 clusters now
is 50 cores. Success of the project led to visibility on both
national and international levels. Nationally, the project led
to another ambitious cluster building at the AUC,
Department of Physics and collaboration on several projects
with the National Authority for Remote Sensing and Space
Sciences (NARSS). The heterogeneous structure of HiPer-
FC is intentionally implemented for research and
development on load balancing. The developed techniques
for load balancing and performance enhancement will in
turn be used and tested when several clusters and computing
nodes are in turn aggregated in Campus Cloud. Physical
resources at Alazhar University and the Arab Academy of
Science and Technology will also be aggregated in the
Campus cloud environment to form larger pool of
resources. We will also explore the development of a
federation of different clouds from the resources in the three
institutions.

The development of the IaaS layer will be based on the
open source frameworks and middleware described I the
previous section. For virtualization and cloud development
tools, we adopt Xen as a virtualization tool, OpenNebula as
a middleware for IaaS, and Claudia for managing the
services of IaaS. The PaaS and SaaS layer will be developed
later using the described in the previous sections.

The implementation will support first the activities of the
researcher and developer to allocate resources based on
virtual machine images that have Appache and Appache ftp
servers. Therefore, the use-cases in the requirements model
that can be developed first are those for the researcher and
developer. These use-case are: Allocate Resources, Deploy
Applications (using java or Python), and Web Host. A
Virtual machine image will be made available for students
programing labs.
VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
We presented in this paper the requirements and
design models for a cloud computing environment that can
be implemented using open-source frameworks and tools.
The environment can be developed by aggregating existing
underutilized campus resources in multiple institutions.
As future work, we intend to implement the
proposed environment and run pilot tests for scientific
applications and for the development of student projects.
The proposed environment can provide cloud computing
research infrastructure and advance the state of the art of
software development methodologies to help solve research,
business, and industry problems. The proposed cloud also
enables world class research activities by providing
computing resources for high performance computing and
large database intensive applications.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research work is funded by Qatar National
Research Fund (QNRF) under the National Priori-ties
Research Program (NPRP) Grant No.: 09-1205-2-470.
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