CUTE: Instructional Laboratories for Cloud Computing Education

Wright State University, Dayton OH

Investigators

Abstract

Compared to the fast development of cloud-based applications and technology, higher education on cloud computing is seriously lagging behind. Built upon the project team's experience on cloud computing education in the past three years, a set of laboratories for cloud computing education, referred to as the CUTE labs, are developed and evaluated by this project. The CUTE labs cover four major areas: the platform exploration labs, the data intensive scalable computing labs, the cloud economics labs and the security and privacy labs. They are designed to use publicly available free cloud resources and open source software with no special requirement on computing infrastructures, so that they can be easily adopted and adapted at low cost. An advisory committee oversees the development and evaluation. This project results in an open source library that fosters a community of cloud computing educational labs. This project helps educate a workforce that understands the principles and masters engineering skills of cloud computing. The labs are disseminated to local collaborating universities and promoted to institutions nationwide for adoption and adaption. The project introduces the cloud computing principles to students from underrepresented groups such as minority and female students via Wright State's GREEN and Wright STEPP programs, and via the collaboration with Central State University, the only public HBCU in Ohio.