Bob Grossman summarizes the major testbeds available for cloud computing work in the community today
Currently, there are relatively few testbeds available to the research community for research in cloud computing and few resources available to developers for testing interoperability. I expect this will change over time, but below are the testbeds that I am aware of and a little bit about each of them. If you know of any others, please let me know so that I can keep the list current (at least for a while until cloud computing testbeds become more common).
Bob then gives brief discussions of the Amazon Cloud products, the Open Cloud Testbed, the Open Cirrus Testbed, Eucalyptus Public Cloud, and Google-IBM-NSF CLuE Resource. He also adds a note on one of the lessons he’s learned from his own work
Before discussing the testbeds per se, I want to highlight one of the lessons that I have learned while working with one of the testbeds — the Open Cloud Testbed (OCT).
Currently the OCT consists of 120 identical nodes and 480 cores. All were purchased and assembled at the same time by the same team. One thing that caught me by suprise is that there are enough small differences between the nodes that the results of some experimental studies can vary by 5%, 10%, 20%, or more, depending upon which nodes are used within the testbed. This is because even one or two nodes with slightly inferior performance can impact the overall end-to-end performance of an application that uses some of today’s common cloud middleware.