Constructing next generation academic cloud services
Mladen Alan Vouk, Samuel F. Averitt, Patrick Dreher, Dennis H. Kekas, Andy Kurth, Marc I. Hoit, Paul Mugge, Aaron Peeler, Henry E. Schaffer, Eric D. Sills, Sarah Stein, John Streck, Josh Thompson, David Wright · International Journal of Cloud Computing · 2013
NC State University (NCSU) is embarked on an ambitious vision to change the paradigm for higher education and research by ‘virtualising’ its award-winning Centennial Campus (creating so called vCentennial). Centennial Campus is a small city made up of NCSU research, teaching and outreach facilities, entrepreneurs, academic entities, private firms, and government agencies. NCSU wants the ability to replicate services and functionality of this physical environment and its virtual avatars ‘anywhere, anytime’ in the world using a cloud of clouds computing platform. The initial operating system for this platform is NCSU’s open source Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL) technology. This paper provides an overview of the vision and discusses several vCentennial pilot projects.