Cyber laboratory: Migration to the hybrid cloud solution for device dependent hardware experiments

Cyber laboratory for FPGA design experiments combines the actual laboratory and the remote laboratory in a seamless way in a hybrid cloud environment. The hybrid cloud consists of on premise private cloud to support device dependent services and a public cloud to support rest of the laboratory services. The on premise private cloud allows concurrent use of device dependent tasks, such as FPGA run services, by making use of the Web services. The elastic nature of the public cloud is suitable for coping with dynamically changing student experimental usages. The number of servers in the public cloud can be scale out or shrink according to the number of simultaneous students accesses. Expensive license CAD tools, such as Verilog-HDL synthesis tools, are allocated for a limited number of the servers in the public cloud and the private cloud, where Verilog-HDL synthesis Web services are realized to achieve remote sharing of these tools. For remote laboratory case, student virtual machines are allocated in the public cloud and remotely issue the FPGA run services and the Verilog-HDL Synthesis services. The existing faculty file/database and education support system serves as an adhesive agent to combine the on premise cloud and the public cloud to minimize the data transfer among them and to perform student VM migrations between remote and actual laboratories. The Cyber Laboratory achieves an efficient use of laboratory platforms and can reduce TCO (total cost of ownership), as the public cloud can cope with the dynamically changing experimental loads.