Cloud Computing | News

Hokkaido U Builds Academic Cloud with Open Source Tech

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 06/20/11

A university in Japan has implemented a supercomputer system that powers a new research cloud. The University of Hokkaido, located on the second largest island in the country, is using CloudStack, an open source cloud platform from United States-based Cloud.com, running on Hitachi gear. The intent is to give university researchers in Japan access to academic computing and technology resources.

"The university was looking for a cost-effective new way for researchers to create, store, and exchange academic contents and to develop experimental systems for their research projects. By choosing to move our existing infrastructure to the cloud, information is now readily available for our researchers," said Masaharu Munetomo, an associate professor in the university's Information Initiative Center. He added CloudStack was chosen "because of its open source structure and innovation."

The university has implemented CloudStack as infrastructure as a service in a virtual environment that runs on Citrix XenServer. The new setup allows a user to provision, manage, and operate IT resources from a unified portal.

On the hardware side, the university is running an Hitachi SR16000, a multi-processor supercomputer; a Compute Blade 2000 blade server; and a Modular Storage 2000 disk array. Hitachi did the cloud integration work.