Seattle: A platform for educational cloud computing

Cloud computing is rapidly increasing in popularity. Companies such as RedHat, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM are increasingly funding cloud computing infrastructure and research, making it important for students to gain the necessary skills to work with cloud-based resources. This paper presents a free, educational research platform called Seattle that is community-driven, a common denominator for diverse platform types, and is broadly deployed. Seattle is community-driven - universities donate available compute resources on multi-user machines to the platform. These donations can come from systems with a wide variety of operating systems and architectures, removing the need for a dedicated infrastructure. Seattle is also surprisingly flexible and supports a variety of pedagogical uses because as a platform it represents a common denominator for cloud computing, grid computing, peer-to-peer networking, distributed systems, and networking. Seattle programs are portable. Students' code can run across different operating systems and architectures without change, while the Seattle programming language is expressive enough for experimentation at a fine-grained level. Our current deployment of Seattle consists of about one thousand computers that are distributed around the world. We invite the computer science education community to employ Seattle in their courses.