New Grant to Support Cloud Computing Research

Majeed Hayat

Nasir Ghani

Nasir Ghani, asso­ciate chair of UNM’s Elec­tri­cal and Com­puter Engi­neer­ing Depart­ment, and Majeed Hayat, asso­ciate direc­tor of the Cen­ter for High Tech­nol­ogy Mate­ri­als, have received a three-year $1.05 mil­lion multi-institution grant from the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) to sup­port work in the area of reli­able cloud-computing ser­vices mod­el­ing and design.

The project, titled “New Par­a­digms for Robust Cloud Net­work­ing Ser­vices,” will focus on study­ing the impact of large-scale fail­ure sce­nar­ios on cloud-computing infra­struc­tures and also devel­op­ing a range of ser­vice sur­viv­abil­ity schemes for dis­as­ter recovery.

Mod­ern com­put­ing par­a­digms are wit­ness­ing expan­sive growth, dri­ven by advances in multi-core proces­sor, stor­age, and high-bandwidth net­work­ing tech­nolo­gies. Now as related price-points con­tinue to decline, these sys­tems are being deployed en masse to inter­con­nect large data-centers and sup­port new vir­tu­al­ized user ser­vices. Broadly termed as cloud-computing ser­vices, these offer­ings use advanced soft­ware vir­tu­al­iza­tion tech­niques to pro­vi­sion cus­tomized con­fig­u­ra­tions for indi­vid­ual client needs.  The abil­ity to “dial-up” con­fig­urable ser­vice offer­ings in a “pay-as-you-go” man­ner can dras­ti­cally reduce phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture “cap-ex” out­lays as well as oper­a­tional “op-ex” costs for providers.

As cloud-based par­a­digms take hold across the com­mer­cial and pri­vate sec­tors, ser­vice reli­a­bil­ity is crit­i­cal. Reli­a­bil­ity is a major con­cern for many users look­ing to migrate their vital data and appli­ca­tions out into the cloud.

Although many cloud ser­vice providers do offer vary­ing types of intra-site server and stor­age backup, these capa­bil­i­ties are more local­ized in nature and largely inef­fec­tive against mas­sive fail­ures affect­ing wide regions, e.g., as occur­ring after nat­ural dis­as­ters, large-scale power out­ages, and mali­cious WMD-based attacks. As a result, the fur­ther use of under­ly­ing cloud net­work­ing recov­ery schemes offers much more poten­tial to improve ser­vice avail­abil­ity needs, and this remains a largely unex­plored area today.

To address these chal­lenges, the two UNM prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tors will part­ner with researchers at Qatar Uni­ver­sity includ­ing Khaled Sha­ban, and Con­cor­dia University’s Chadi Assi, to con­duct a detailed study on cloud net­work­ing sur­viv­abil­ity under this award. In par­tic­u­lar, the UNM team will work on the design of dynamic pre/post-fault recov­ery schemes and also con­duct detailed sto­chas­tic mod­el­ing of cloud recov­ery per­for­mance and reli­a­bil­ity. More­over, the out­comes and find­ings of this work will also con­tribute sig­nif­i­cantly toward tech­nol­ogy advance­ment in this crit­i­cal space. This project will run from 2013–2016 and will train sev­eral doc­toral stu­dents across the part­ner­ing insti­tu­tions, pro­vid­ing them with invalu­able oppor­tu­ni­ties to col­lab­o­rate with an inter­na­tional team of researchers.

Over­all, the QNRF is part of the Qatar Foun­da­tion and is a selec­tive and well-established fund­ing agency that actively sup­ports large col­lab­o­ra­tive research efforts across the globe. In addi­tion to this new project, Ghani and Hayat have also estab­lished a very strong research record in the area of cyber-infrastructure design, resource allo­ca­tion in dis­trib­uted com­put­ing sys­tems, and dis­as­ter recovery.

Most notably, the PIs have received sev­eral prior research awards from the Defense Threat Reduc­tion Agency (DTRA), Depart­ment of Energy (DoE), and the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion (NSF). For fur­ther infor­ma­tion, visit Dr. Ghani’s and Dr. Hayat’s research sites.

Media Con­tact: Karen Went­worth (505) 277‑5627; email: kwent2@unm.edu