Scaling and benchmarking application frameworks in the cloud. How will popular development environments like RoR scale/perform on modern (manycore) platforms and on “cloud computing” platforms such as Amazon EC2? We are collaborating with RAD Lab founding sponsor Sun Microsystems on investigating scalability and performance of RoR and other Web platforms, on both “cloud computing” environments and modern multicore hardware. We have made many improvements to Sun’s Olio, now an Apache Foundation Incubator project, have suggested a metric and methodology for evaluating its performance in different deployment environments, and are using it internally as a representative Web 2.0 test app (which can be used with two different workload generators, Faban and Rain) for a number of projects.

  • Undergraduate Students: Aaron Beitch, Timothy Yung, David Mills (visiting SUPERB student), Arthur Klepchukov (graduated 2009), Hubert Wong (graduated 2009, now at Amazon.com), Jimmy Nguyen (graduated 2009)
  • Collaborators: Will Sobel (visiting lecturer until May 2009, now at SystemInsights.com); Shanti Subramanyam, Akara Sucharitakul, Sheetal Patil (Sun Microsystems)

Want to use Cloudstone/Olio?

You’ll need all of the following pieces.  Note that since this project is over we can offer no technical support for getting this running, so please understand that we will not respond to such requests at all.

Selected papers (PDFs for most camera-ready papers can be found here):

  • Cloud Computing: What’s In It For Me as a Scientist? Science (Perspectives column), January 28, 2011.
  • The Potential of Cloud Computing: Opportunities and Challenges. The Bridge (quarterly journal of the National Academy of Engineering), Feb. 2011.
    • This article accompanies an invited presentation at the NAE Frontiers of Engineering 2010 (Oct. 2010).
  • A View of Cloud Computing.  CACM 53(4), April 2010.  A shorter version of our Above The Clouds paper.
  • Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing. Written with many RAD Lab colleagues, our view of what’s really new about cloud computing, and its challenges and opportunities going forward.
  • W. Sobel, S. Subramanyam, A. Sucharitakul, J. Nguyen, H. Wong, S. Patil, A. Fox, D. Patterson. Cloudstone: Multi-Platform, Multi-Language Benchmark and Measurement Tools for Web 2.0. Proc. 1st Workshop on Cloud Computing (CCA 08), Chicago, IL, October 2008.

More details:

The Above the Clouds article was written to provide a clear perspective on our particular views of cloud computing and to clarify terminology at a time of high blogosphere hype.  The long version of the article was read “at the highest levels of major IT companies” according to a knowledgeable RAD Lab industrial affiliate, and appears to have been influential (for better or worse) in shaping many discussions of cloud computing policy, economics, and pros & cons.

The short version in CACM also contains more up-to-date examples and data, since it was prepared nearly a year after the original article was published.  We continue to receive (and respond to) reader comments on the Above the Clouds blog (link above).

In our CCA’08 paper we describe experiments to understand Web 2.0 app performance (both Rails and PHP versions of the app) on Amazon’s EC2. The links to download AMI’s to reproduce our results will appear here shortly, or you can email me.