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Professor Rich Wolski is a co-principle investigator on a recent $5 million National Science Foundation grant, entitled Data Analysis and Management Building Blocks for Multi-Campus Cyberinfrastructure through Cloud Federation, along with researchers from Cornell University and the University at Buffalo. The project aims to build a federated cloud, deployed at the three collaborating universities, known as the Aristotle Cloud Federation. UCSB will host one of three clouds, each of which will be running Eucalyptus -- an open source cloud platform originally developed at UCSB as a research project and now supported commercially by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. UCSB researchers will be working with collaborators to understand how clouds hosted at these sites can be federated to work together across campus boundaries. In particular, UCSB will be looking at the problems of load sharing and identity federation. As separate campuses, local science users of each cloud must be able to temporarily "burst" workload to the other remote clouds without pre-empting the work that is running at those remote sites.  If successful, the project (driven by UCSB research and open source contribution) will enable new methodologies for cross-campus resource sharing via federated campus clouds.

Several teams of scientists will share the cloud resources for their projects, including Kate McCurdy and researchers from UCSB's Sedgwick natural reserve who hope to use the cloud resources to help manage the reserve. They hope to automate some of the processes associated with their wildlife survey activities by using Aristotle to process digital images that are gathered by camera traps located throughout the reserve.