The Open Cloud Testbed (OCT): A Platform for Research into new Cloud Technologies

The NSF-funded Open Cloud Testbed (OCT) project is building and supporting a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud platforms – the underlying software which provides cloud services to applications. Testbeds such as OCT are critical for enabling research into new cloud technologies – research that requires experiments which potentially change the operation of the cloud itself.This paper gives an overview of the Open Cloud Testbed, including an overview on the existing components OCT is based on and the description of new infrastructure and software extension. In addition, we present several use cases of OCT, including a description of FPGA-based research enabled by newly-deployed resources.