Washington, DC — Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The University of Texas at San Antonio, and the University of Notre Dame are working with Internet2 and Rackspace Hosting, the open cloud company, to build an OpenStack-based hybrid cloud environment for the research and education community. The new Internet2 NET+ services are expected to be available to other institutions in spring 2014.

By leveraging Internet2’s secure high-performance network, universities can connect their campus’ private clouds to the Rackspace public cloud. Researchers can then use regional, national and global research and education networks to create hybrid clouds powered by OpenStack.

Campuses around the world will have enhanced access to two new Internet2 NET+ service offerings from Rackspace, including the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud portfolio of public and private cloud solutions powered by OpenStack. These services will enable researchers, educators and students to conduct research projects faster and on a much broader scale. 

“We are building a network and an OpenStack-optimized, hybrid cloud to dynamically move computation into a high-performance cloud via an optimized network. The goal is to provide transparent access to remote computing resources such that no effort is required on the part of the scientist to move computation, based on changing resource availability and data locality,” said Paul Brenner, associate director, Center of Research Computing, University of Notre Dame.

“As cloud computing becomes more and more mainstream, it is also changing. The computing architecture of the near future will include aspects of high-performance computing and big data,” said Paul Rad, director, The University of Texas at San Antonio Cloud and Big-Data Laboratory. “We are researching federation and convergence of high-performance computing and cloud architecture. This combines the best of both worlds: self-service and on-demand experience layers of cloud combined with infrastructure performance and resiliency of high-performance computing.”

“Computing at many different scales touches many aspects of research, education and innovation on today’s campus,” said Chris Hill, director, MIT Research Computing Project. “An important way to meet the continually evolving and growing data and compute ambitions of the full range of campus activities is through advancing innovative service models of computing that can potentially fuse the right elements of desktop environments, cloud technologies, big-data innovation and high-performance computing for a given project. The Internet2 NET+ OpenStack hybrid cloud initiative is a valuable movement in this direction. This initiative could be a potentially important collaborative step toward mature service models for a broad spectrum of research computing needs.”

“This NET+ service fills an important need for Internet2 community and our regional and global partners who can use the extreme performance of the Internet2 Network combined with the open architecture of OpenStack to eliminate the need for very large data sets to travel over the public Internet,” said Shelton Waggener, senior vice president, Internet2. “Researchers and the higher education instructional community will be able to use Rackspace public cloud and OpenStack-based Private Cloud environments hosted at an Internet2 university where bandwidth is managed and high-speed delivery ensured, with minimal delay or latency. Imagine the innovation that will take place by participating campuses working in such a trusted, secure high performance environment.”

“We appreciate the Internet2 community collaborating with Rackspace to establish direct network peering to the Internet2 Network and bringing the power of OpenStack-based hybrid cloud services to the entire education and research community,” said, John Engates CTO of Rackspace. “We are excited about the possibilities of providing our unique technology to benefit research, education and innovation.”

Rackspace and NASA founded the OpenStack project in 2010. Later, more organizations joined in with the movement including Dell, Citrix, Intel, Cisco and many others.

About Internet2
Internet2 is a member-owned advanced technology community founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 provides a collaborative environment for U.S. research and education organizations to solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in support of their educational, research and community service missions.

Internet2 also operates the nation’s largest and fastest, coast-to-coast research and education network, and serves more than 90,000 research and educational institutions, including more than 245 U.S. universities, 70 government agencies, 38 regional and state education networks, 60 leading corporations working with our community and more than 100 national research and education networking partners representing more than 50 countries.