The IEEE Intercloud Testbed - Creating the Global Cloud of Clouds

This paper presents the current work of the IEEE Intercloud Testbed project. The notion of an Intercloud has been an active research topic. Within the IEEE several researchers formed a Standards Working Group (IEEE P2302) where a specific set of conventions, formats, and protocols were proposed. It was decided by those in the Standards Working Group that due to the scale, variability of component Compute Clouds, and lack of insight into extremely large Compute Cloud operational issues, such a system could not realistically be fully defined without live experimentation. Therefore it was decided to set up a specifically structured organization within the IEEE in parallel to the Standards Working Group, to provide a structure for a live, experimental testbed. This paper describes the innovative organizational structure and various policies were used to provide the desire context. Also covered are how we sorted the issues around governance of the namespace, and the technical details of reference "Root" and "Exchange" functions. Ongoing work includes the plan to bootstrap the new testbed.