Case Study: Openstack in a mixed teaching and research environment

The rapid enrolment growth of Carleton University’s School of Computer Science (SCS) has brought challenges related to course delivery. With the increasingly complex curriculum and assignments, it is difficult to assess... [ view full abstract ]

The rapid enrolment growth of Carleton University’s School of Computer Science (SCS) has brought challenges related to course delivery. With the increasingly complex curriculum and assignments, it is difficult to assess large numbers of students. Once it was easy to have students submit a few programming source files. Now, course curriculum often results in complex source code and significant modification to libraries, services or even the operating system itself. How can this be efficiently passed to Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Instructors for assessment?

Openstack permits SCS to support large classes in a variety of subject areas by hosting significant numbers of virtual machine instances. With the easy to use dashboard, students, TAs and instructors have been able to easily deploy, connect to, and evaluate development environments in shared project spaces. Instructors are able to easily deploy updated environments to their students. To have their work assessed, students need simply pass the name or IP address of their instance to their TAs. Utilizing modest resources, the School’s compute nodes were sometimes over-subscribed by as much as 700%, yet the system still performed as demanded.

This will be a report on the first full-year of operation for the SCS OpenStack. The service evolved from a single user pilot project, to a heavily utilized mixed-use resource that supports multiple classes as well as research labs and individual researchers. The interest in the service has been very high, and it is receiving significant investment going forward, both within SCS and in a university-wide expansion.