About The CAC

Technical Scope

The scope of the CAC center broadly encompasses cloud computing systems at every level, including applications development and the use of autonomic computing methods for the management of these systems. CAC activities on cloud computing cut across several layers of IT systems, including: hardware platforms for computing, storage and networking; design of data centers that aggregate platforms to provide cloud services; systems software and distributed computing middleware providing programming interfaces and management primitives within and across multiple cloud data centers; applications that leverage the on-demand and scalable nature of cloud platforms; and cyber-security.

The CAC's current activities focus on improving methods, architectures, and technologies for the design, implementation, integration, and evaluation of computing systems and applications, especially in ways that are capable of achieving desired behaviors without the involvement of users or administrators. As a forefront research center at the intersection of cloud computing and autonomic computing, the CAC aims to promote automated advanced self-management capabilities within and across the layers of cloud and advanced distributed computing systems and applications in order to enable independent operation, minimize cost and risk, accommodate complexity and reduce technological uncertainty, and enable development of systems of systems with large numbers of components.

About the CAC@TTU

Mission

Our mission is to provide a practical and collaborative work arena for the development and coordination of methods and standards that are specifically applicable to cloud and other forms of advanced distributed computing. Areas of interest include cloud-specific algorithms, implementations and standards, distributed and autonomic computing applications, paradigms, and methods.

Goals

The primary goal of the CAC@TTU is to identify and foster industry-academia-government partnerships on topics directly related to emerging cloud infrastructures, software, and standards, including issues related to security, performance, interoperability and workload portability across infrastructure boundaries. A related practical goal is to identify and develop coordinated efforts to organize, classify, and develop reference implementations and software that showcase the benefits of cloud and autonomic computing in areas of real-world applicability to business needs. Ranking equally with these is our goal to create a well-trained workforce through opportunities that relate the domain expertise of faculty and students to important problems and solutions in advanced distributed computing, cloud computing and autonomic computing that is capable of sustaining the activities and opportunities created through this joint effort.

Objectives

• Prototyping reference implementations using current and emerging cloud standards.
• Prototyping API's that demonstrate federation, automation, and interoperability.
• Cloud-specific algorithms and frameworks.
• Big Data paradigms for distributed and autonomic computing.
• Develop "Make-it" to "Market" strategies for cloud applications.

Industry Advisory Board

The Center is governed through an Industry Advisory Board, which selects research topics and sets priorities. Please refer to the NSF recommended Industry Membership Agreement.

Acknowledgment

The Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center site at Texas Tech University (CAC@TTU) is supported by the National Science Foundation through award numbers 1362134 and 1939140.