In this paper we present our experience in building the Research Compute Cloud (RC2), a cloud computing platform for use by the worldwide IBM Research community. Within eleven months of its official release RC2 has reached a community of 631 users spanning 34 countries, and serves on average 350 active users and 1800 active VM instances per month. Besides offering a utility computing platform across a heterogeneous pool of servers, RC2 aims at providing a living lab for experimenting with new cloud technologies and accelerating their transfer to IBM products. This paper describes our experience in designing and implementing a flexible infrastructure to enable rapid integration of novel ideas while preserving the overall stability and consumability of the system.
['Kyung Dong Ryu', 'Xiaolan Zhang', 'Glenn Ammons', 'Vasanth Bala', 'Stefan Berger', 'Dilma Da Silva', 'Jim Doran', 'Frank Franco', 'Alexei Karve', 'Herb Lee', 'James A. Lindeman', 'Ajay Mohindra', 'Bob Oesterlin', 'Giovanni Pacifici', 'Dimitrios Pendarakis', 'Darrell C. Reimer', 'Mariusz Sabath']
RC2-a living lab for cloud computing