Working groups support the interest and activities of OCC Members. Currently, there are four OCC working groups:
Working Group on Standards and Interoperability For Large Data Clouds
An architecture for clouds popularized by a series of Google technical reports consists of a storage cloud providing a distributed file system, a compute cloud supporting MapReduce, and a data cloud supporting table services. The open source Hadoop system follows this architecture. The working group uses the name large data clouds for these types of clouds.
The focus of this working group is on developing standards for interoperating large data clouds. For example, what are standard interfaces to storage clouds and compute clouds? What are appropriate benchmarks for large data clouds?
Projects from this working groups include:
The Open Cloud Testbed Working Group
This working group manages and operates the Open Cloud Testbed. The Open Cloud Testbed uses the Cisco C-Wave and the UIC Teraflow Network for its network connections. Both use wavelengths provided by the National Lambda Rail. Currently membership in this working group is limited to OCC members who contribute computing, networking, or other resources to the Open Cloud Testbed.
The Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC) Working Group
This is a new working group that manages and operates a large data cloud for scientific data. Members of this working group include: the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who is developing the Sector/Sphere system; the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology at the University of Chicago, who uses the OSDC as part of the the Cistrack system; Johns Hopkins University who is using the OSDC to manage astronomical data; iCAIR at Northwestern University, who is using the OSDC to help develop next generation Internet protocols. Partners of the OSCD include: Yahoo, who contributed equipment to the OSDC and Cisco who are providing the Cisco C-Wave.
Intercloud Testbed Working Group
This working group building a testbed to explore using IF-MAP based services to name entities relevant to clouds. Examples of entities in IaaS include: virtual machines, virtual networks and virtual data centers. Examples of entities in PaaS include: files (for Storage as a Service) and tables and related elements (for Data as a Service). This working group is also exploring frameworks for bridging between IaaS and PaaS using these services.