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UCSB Cloud Computing to be included in Ubuntu Distribution

Cloud computing systems provide access to large pools of data and
computational resources, and large companies from Google, to IBM, to
Microsoft are investing heavily in the idea. While companies compete
to attract users to their clouds, a team of UCSB researchers have
created a breakthrough technology that will allow anyone to set up
their own cloud systems on existing hardware — and it has just been
announced that this technology will be included as part of the Ubuntu
distribution. Daniel Nurmi, Chris Grzegorczyk, Graziano Obertelli,
Sunil Soman, Lamia Youseff, and Dmitrii Zagorodnov, under the
direction of Professor Rich Wolski, have developed one of the world’s
first open source Cloud-computing systems: Eucalyptus.

Eucalyptus is an open source software framework for cloud computing
that implements what is commonly referred to as Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS); systems that give users the ability to run and control
isolated collections of virtual machine instances deployed across a
variety physical resources.

Originally developed as part of the VGrADS project,
Eucalyptus uses open source components to implement a cloud computing
infrastructure on cluster computing resources. Freely available from
the Eucalyptus home page hosted in Professor Wolski’s research lab,
it has been downloaded by more than 10,000 users in 72 countries.

And now, the Ubuntu distribution will be distributing Eucalyptus.

Canonical, the sponsor of Ubuntu, is working with Eucalyptus to
provide an offering that enables users to deploy open source
cloud-like environments in their own data center. Canonical’s Ubuntu
Enterprise Cloud offering, powered by Eucalyptus’ technology, will
bring Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)-like infrastructure
capabilities inside the firewall.

According to Simon Wardley, support services manager at Canonical,
“Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud simplifies the process of building and
managing an internal cloud, enabling enterprise environments to create
their own self-service infrastructure. Canonical is committed to
matching emerging standards in the cloud and has selected Eucalyptus
to lie at the core of the Ubuntu system.”

“We are thrilled that Eucalyptus is having such a large impact on the
cloud computing community,” Professor Wolski says. “It has turned out
to be a great opportunity for the students and postdocs who work on
the project to see the fruits of their research influence the
emergence of such a new computing paradigm.”

He adds that working with an organization with the global reach of
Canonical presents new and exciting challenges. “Canonical manages a
vast catalog of open source components, of which Eucalyptus is only
one. They are very good at coordinating simultaneous development
efforts in many different countries in a way that produces a
high-quality distribution on a short release cycle. It has been a
tremendous learning experience to be able to work with them.”

The next release of Ubuntu (Ubuntu 9.04) entitled “Jaunty Jackalope”
will include Eucalyptus and will be available April 23rd of 2009 as a
preview of its cloud capabilities. The follow-on release (Ubuntu
9.10), due out in October of this year, is code-named “Karmic Koala,”
will feature cloud technologies in its server configurations and is so
named because of the core role Eucalyptus will play.

More information, and a distribution of the code, can be found at
the eucalyptus project website.