| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | April 2, 2014 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | April 2, 2021 |
| Award Number: | 1362134 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Behrooz Shirazi
bshirazi@nsf.gov (703)292-8343 CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | April 15, 2014 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2021 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $300,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $630,331.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2015 = $117,395.00 FY 2016 = $145,000.00 FY 2017 = $60,000.00 FY 2018 = $73,410.00 FY 2019 = $139,665.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2500 BROADWAY LUBBOCK TX US 79409 (806)742-3884 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
Drane 162, MS 4-1167 Lubbock TX US 79409-1167 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | IUCRC-Indust-Univ Coop Res Ctr |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001415RB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001516RB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001617DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001920RB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Texas Tech University (TTU) is proposing to be added as a site to the existing I/UCRC for Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC). TTU site will focus on cloud standards and standards-based software development innovation. It will extend and enhance the activities of the CAC in areas related to cloud computing best practices and standards research, including standards-based software, development and use of software stacks and reference implementations, and industry applications in real-world settings. TTU site will be working with the largest and most active of the computing-oriented Standards Development Organizations and vendors. The research effort will meet the industry need to organize, classify, develop reference implementations and contribute to the standards-based software in advanced distributed computing. Development of appropriate industry- and community-based consensus standards and application of these methods are required to exploit the capacity for transformative change provided by the new techniques for cloud and other advanced distributed computing. Without coordination on interface standards, algorithms and techniques, many potential advantages of these methods may be compromised due to a chaotic multiplicity of approaches, protocols and application programmer interfaces.
The TTU site will leverage contacts with three outreach-oriented organizations with which the PIs are involved: (1) the TTU STEM Education & Outreach project for which the university has been nationally recognized; (2) by extensions of the existing High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) involvement in the SURAgrid regional grid and cloud computing educational dissemination project (including ongoing collaborations with the SURAgrid Virtual Organization and Cloud Computing Options Working Group); and (3) the High Performance Computing Across Texas (HiPCAT) organization, which concentrates on broadening access to grid and cloud computing in the physical sciences. The TTU HPCC and the PIs have extensive involvement with each of these programs. The site will develop an annual targeted workshop to integrate hands-on learning experiences for historically under-represented population groups into the projects that will be carried out during the performance period of this proposal, as well as activities to engage with the needs of selected non-profit organizations in areas in which they could benefit from the use of cloud computing. Texas Tech University has a number of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) educational outreach programs that overlap in the area of recruiting new students and in the mentoring of STEM students from underrepresented groups. The PIs will leverage these programs to strengthen their recruitment efforts.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The research of the Cloud and Autonomic Computing (CAC) industry/university cooperative research center at Texas Tech in its Phase I grant was oriented directly at the broad range of distributed and automated technologies that underlies most of modern computing and data processing infrastructure. During this first phase of the CAC center's operations at Texas Tech, research ranged from applications in banking, defense, health care, and other critical industries to topics related to the underlying infrastructure of the resources that support such applications. The CAC at TTU also carried out a wide variety of outreach and dissemination projects to promote the use of these new methods in broader settings.
Intellectual Merit:
Application areas supported by CAC industry members included data warehousing an analysis to support studies on readmission risk and risk stratification in population health, conversion to cloud methods of financial risk algorithms for banking and loans, containerization of distributed database methods, and validation of exposome studies on disease propagation. Infrastructure areas explored in Phase I included advanced hierarchical storage tiering methods, extended addressing capabilities for CPUs based on RISC-V architecture, and a wide variety of topics related to data center automation, analytics, visualization, and control. The CAC at TTU helped pioneer the use of new data center oriented standards in cooperation with industry, including the Redfish standard that is now widely adopted for data center automation and control and the related Swordfish standard for data storage operations. Our work helped to test and refine the use of Redfish and Swordfish at scale and to extend the use of monitoring and visualization based on this and other methods to produce tools of practical use to modern data center operations. We produced and documented a method to automate the "Green 500" benchmarking process to evaluate the energy efficiency of computing clusters, created methods to create clusters from scratch from bare metal deployments using Redfish or the older IPMI standard in the context of the OpenHPC open source cluster management project. This work set the stage for advanced visualization and feedback systems to be pursued under CAC Phase II.
Broader Impacts:
In the process of pursuing the above work, the CAC site at TTU created and released several items of open source software available on the center's public GitHub page (https://github.com/nsfcac), held a variety of workshops on topics related to Datacenter Automation, Analytics, and Control (DAAC) (http://daac-workshop.org), and helped to organize a variety of related conferences including the IEEE/ACM Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC, http://ucc-conference.org) and co-located Big Data Computing, Applications, and Technologies (BDCAT, http://bdcat-conference.org). CAC at TTU participants applied this work to studies on the topic of return on investment for academic uses of data centers and clouds, in cooperation with the Coalition for Advanced Scientific Computation (CASC, https://casc.org) and co-led a working group on this topic that produced several papers and that led to creation of an annual longitudinal survey to track levels of adoption and use of both on-premises and cloud-based resources for Research Computing and Data (RCD) support by academic institutions. The CAC at TTU produced a total of 162 conference papers and publications over its six years of operation including five years of the original grant as well as slighly over a year of no-cost extension. The CAC also participated in and/or created a variety of outreach projects such as REU programs, creation of a local chapter of Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC, https://womeninhpc.org/), demonstration videos for released code, and cooperation with the standards development efforts of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA, https://snia.org), Open Grid Forum (OGF, https://www.ogf.org), Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF, https://dmtf.org), and related international efforts for working grousp at the national Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST) and the International Standards Organization/International Electroctechnical Commission (ISO/IEC SC38).
Phase I Outcomes and Phase II Plans:
At the end of this period of operation, the CAC submitted and was approved for continued operation under NSF award #1939140 (https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1939140) as the central site for an integrated Phase II center along with the University of Arizona and its international affiliate sites at Universidad de Sonora, Mexico and the American University at Malta. We have also created official CAC affiliate site arrangements with two other universities, University of North Texas and Texas State University, for operations as an integrated center.
Last Modified: 09/15/2021
Modified by: Alan F Sill
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