XSEDE is seeing a growing portfolio of cloud and virtualization resources being added to the diverse set of resources that XSEDE allocates and uses as part of the XSEDE Federation. With these new resources come new challenges and opportunities for effective use of these resources for furthering scientific research. The “Topics on Cloud and Virtualization in XSEDE” BOF will provide a short overview of the cloud and virtualization capabilities available in XSEDE (including IU’s Jetstream, PSC’s Bridges, SDSC’s Comet and Cornell’s Aristotle, the DIBBs cloud federation) and NSF’s cloud projects. Additionally, the BOF will initiate and foster discussion on the challenges and opportunities for collaboration and coordination for this growing community. The organizers will provide a collected set of topics and challenges from the SPs and user community to foster discussion. Prior to the BOF, the organizers will solicit questions, comments and references regarding key topic and challenge areas to be presented to spur discussion including but not limited to:
• Shared image and container repositories • Image security vetting best practices • Cloud and virtualization standard adoption (or not!) • AAA • Security (including how to provide bare metal access), identity management and authentication • Use cases and software needs & requirements (leading to image development) • Staff skills and training needed • What is new with clouds and virtualization that is needed by our XSEDE user community
