Mission Statement
The success of cloud computing and its emergence
into a multi-billion dollar industry, is driven by innovation in
industry and academia, as well as the plethora of open-source systems
in use in industry. The design and implementation of cloud computing
systems today rely on the past many decades of knowledge and key pieces
of wisdom from the areas of distributed systems, operating systems, and
networking. At the same time, this new age brings forth new challenges
(e.g., scalability, fault-tolerance, geo-distribution, performance, and
many others) that require old problems to be revisited and new
solutions devised.
The Blue and Orange Cloud Computing Center (BOCCE: spelled as "Bocce"
or "Bocci") at Illinois has two parallel missions. First, we undertake
research in many areas of cloud computing (which may also be known as
"Systems for Big Data") that meet new challenges and new problems,
covering several highly-active areas of cloud computing software
systems in industry. During this research, we devise new algorithms and
techniques, new systems designs, build and deploy new systems. Some of
our systems are built from scratch, while others involve changes to
industry's popular open-source systems. We also work closely with our
industry partners (
Microsoft,
Yahoo!,
VMWare)
and with industry-scale open-source companies.
The second mission of the BOCC3 Center is educational. This is
two-pronged. First, we offer free online courses every year to students
all over the world. There are five such courses offered via Coursera
(each course lasting 4 or 5 weeks). These courses are also available as
a package under a Cloud Specialization on Coursera. The courses cover
cloud computing concepts (distributed systems), cloud applications, and
cloud networking. Today, University of Illinois is the
only university offering a Cloud
Specialization on Coursera. Second, for our on-campus students, we
offer multiple courses in areas including distributed systems,
operating systems, cloud computing systems, networking, and multimedia.
For more information, please visit the
Education
page.
The BOCCE Center is generously supported by a gift from Microsoft (Azure Team), as well as by the National Science Foundation.