The Huawei-TELUS Innovation Centre for Enterprise Cloud Services on Carleton campus has finally opened. The lab, announced in June, and with a $1.4-million investment from Shenzen China-based Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and Vancouver-based Telus, is already being utilized by graduate students for six ongoing projects.
Shikharesh Majumdar, professor of systems and computer engineering for Ottawa-based Carleton University said the project was completed on time. “We are pretty much in line with what was planned,” he said. “Research with masters and PhD students has begun.”
As for the current selected projects, Majumdar said they were culled from the two major concerns facing modern cloud computing. “One is security,” he said. “People want to make sure that the environment they’re putting the data in is safe to share with others.” Majumdar said the other issue is performance.
Ibrahim Gedeon, chief technology officer for Telus, said it hopes the project will make cloud innovation more possible in Canada. “(We’re) trying to make cloud practical,”he said. “(We want to) allow Canada to make a bigger leap in cloud.”
The initial six projects that Carleton’s cloud services lab will use its virtualized environment to tackle are Resource Management on Clouds, Traffic Control for Data Centre Networks, Intrusion Detection in the Cloud, Adaptive SLA-Based Resource Allocation and Management in Cloud Computing Systems and Cloud DC Network – VM migration with IP Address Change.
Majumdar also said that Telus has already extended its contribution to include further internal resources. “In addition to the in-house equipment…we have access to a Telus Toronto lab,” he said.
Peter Ashwood-Smith, leader of research at Huawei, re-iterated that while the lab may be established, it is by no means the end of collaboration with the college. “We don’t mind adding some more equipment if projects need specialty equipment,” he said. “I don’t’ think (the lab) is complete but it’s a good starting point.”
Majumdar said that scheduled meetings with Carleton’s industry partners are already in place. “We look forward to having an active collaboration,” he said.
While students have already been brought into the lab, Majumdar also said that Carleton is actively recruiting students from within the Carleton campus and graduate students across Canada. “People with good academic records, people with good skills in dealing with the practical problems, programming skills,” he said. “At Carelton, we are very excited about he project. It’s working with state-of-the-art technology. Working with industry.”