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.