The Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud
Published: 25 September 2013
• The Raspberry Pi Cloud has been used on two lecture courses. • Six undergraduate students have helped to build the Cloud. • Attracted significant domestic and international media attention and praise. • Featured at the SICSA demofest and at the University of Stirling. • First research publication presented at an international conference in July 2013. • Featured in an invited conference tutorial in St Petersburg, September 2013.
The Glasgow Raspberry Pi Cloud has featured in The Metro and The Herald Newspapers, major online websites such as Computer
Weekly and TechWeek, and many more publications. It has received press coverage in India, Thailand, Australia, France, and
Germany.
In the first year, four undergraduate students and two summer interns have been directly involved in the construction of the Raspberry Pi Cloud, giving them the unique experience of hands-on time developing a Cloud infrastructure. Two of these students have subsequently enrolled for PhDs within the school, one of them working on cloud computing. During Summer 2012, Robbie
Simpson (now a PhD student) spent three months working on the design of the Raspberry Cloud, testing hardware and building two prototypes. During Summer 2013 a School funded summer intern, James Burke, has been building a teaching evaluation platform for the Raspberry Pi Cloud. When complete, the platform will be used in senior and junior undergraduate classes for the interactive evaluation of Computing Science concepts such as distributed algorithms and parallel processing infrastructures. Cloud constructors: Dr Posco Tso oversees construction by volunteer PhD and undergraduate students. Lectures The Cloud made its first appearance.
The Cloud made its first appearance in lectures as part of the Distributed Algorithms and Systems (DAS4) course, taught by
Dr. Dimitrios Pezaros. Students were excited after the lecture and said they were looking forward to a standalone course on Cloud Computing and Cloud Infrastructure. Dr Jeremy Singer demonstratedcloud based software deployment models in the Professional Software Development (PSD3) lecture on Software Deployment. Students were clearly interested and engaged in this interactive session it livened up what is normally quite a mundane part of the course.
Simon Jouet, a PhD student, presented the first publication on the work in July 2013 at a major international conference. The presentation generated significant interest from researchers involved in Distributed Systems. A Lecturer from the University of Sydney is interested in building on the Raspberry Pi Cloud research as part of a Cloud computing postgraduate course, and we are also discussing a network connection with a Raspberry Pi Cloud to be constructed in Sydney!
Featured at many university open days, and included on promotional material sent out to students. Many students who had experience with the Raspberry Pi and had previously heard about the project approached us to learn more.
Currently, we are working on a complex software system to enable us to fully replicate a Cloud datacentre’s operations. We are planning to expand the teaching role of the Cloud this year, through new student projects and development of an extended teaching software platform on the Pi’s. We intend to begin evaluation of the Raspberry Pi Cloud as a platform for more advanced research into managing and engineering cloud infrastructure. For example, we intend to use the Cloud as a demonstration of the potential of Software Defined Networking (SDN), a high-profile development in networks research that was the subject of a recent workshop organised by Dr Posco Tso.
First published: 25 September 2013
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