Sun's Center of Excellence in Open Source Computing and Applications (OSCA)

College of Engineering, Wayne State University

 

Mission

Facility

Activities

In partnership between Wayne State University and Sun Microsystem, the OSCA center is established to promote research and education activities on open source computing technology. Its mission is to grow the community of open source users and developers on campus, and further enable students to grow their skills and experience around the open source technology to apply in future career opportunities. The center sponsors discussion forums and workshops, provides remote access to open source hardware/software systems installed at the center, create and disseminate software optimized for the systems, and perform research on the design of networked computing systems, algorithms, and applications.

The center was funded by Sun Microsystems Sun's 2009 Center of Excellence Program, Sun's Academic Excellence Programs in 2007, 2008, and 2009, and Sun's Campus Ambassador Program in 2008-2009.

The center is hosted in the College of Engineering and administrated by computer engineering faculty.

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OSCA Facility

One of the OSCA objectives is to build an open-source based shared computing infrastructure at Wayne State University to support research and education activities in computer architecture, operating systems, virtual machines, parallel computing, networking and distrubuted systems, wireless and embedded systems, and applications. The shared infrastructure is organized and run in a cloud computing model, based on various open-source technologies, including Sun OpenSPARC, OpneSolaris, VirtualBox, and OpenOffice. Funded by Sun Microsystems, current installation of the systems include

• three Sun Enterprise T5220/T5120 server, each with 8-core UltraSPARC T2 processor and 32GB memory;
• one Sun Fire T2000 with 8-core T1 processor and 16 GB memory;
• six Sun Fire X2200, each with a two-socket dual-core AMD Opteron with 8 GB memory.
• one FPGA evaluation board with OpenSPARC T1 core, which enables users to build T1-based real systems.

In addition, the OSCA center has another Linux/x86 server cluster, including 17 servers, each with two-socket quad-core Xeon servers with 8GB memory. It is funded by National Science Foundation, through its Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) program.

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OSCA Research/Education Activities

The OSCA facility is open to faculty and students at Wayne State University in support of their research actities. See faculty webpages for related research projects.

Promotion of open source technology through education and training is an integral component of the OSCA center's mission. The OSCA computing infrastructure exposes students to a wide array of open source technologies and prepare them to enter the industry with adequate understanding of the opportunities and challenges.

The open source technology is integrated into computer engineering and science curriculum in both undergradaute and undergraduate levels. In addition, the center organizes complementary workshops and tutorials, through Sun's Campus Ambassadar program. Recent tutorials include:

• April 30, 2009, MySQL and Beyond. Speakers: Duleepa Wijayawardhana and Scott Seighman, both from Sun Microsystems.
• March 10, 2009, OpenSolaris: Virtual Operating Systems with OpenSolaris Containers and Zones, VirtualBox. Speaker: Jeff Victor of Sun Microsystems.
• February 5, 2009, Sun Academic Initiative Online Learning Network. Speaker: Mumtaz Dawoodi (Sun Campus Ambassdar).
• November 7, 2009, Application Profiling Using OpenSolaris Dtrace Speaker: Mumtaz Dawoodi (Sun Campus Ambassdar)
• October 24, 2008, Sun Open Source Computing Technologies, Speaker: Scott Davidson of Sun Microsystems.

Room 3160 Engineering Building, Wayne State University
5050 Anthony Wayne Dr. Detroit, Michigan 48202
Phone: 1-313-577 3856