Cloud computing technology is gaining much importance and popularity in recent years. In order to carry out an in-depth study of this technology and to cultivate talents, National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) and Delta Electronics collaborated in launching a 3-year cloud computing teaching and research program starting in January 2012. This program combines Delta Electronics’ rich industrial experience and the strong teaching and research team from NCTU’s College of Computer Science and College of Electrical & Computer Engineering. The overall goal is to cultivate talents for Taiwan’s cloud computing industry who are capable of developing system software.

Credit Program in Cloud Computing

Tseng Yu-Chee, Dean of College of Computer Science, said during the collaboration conference that the purpose of the industry-university collaboration program is to equip and strengthen students with both practical skills and theories so that, during the course of study, students will understand the industry’s requirements and how to expand the applications of cloud computing. Therefore, the main content of this credit program involves system software, with cloud computing as its objective, in the hope of cultivating IT talents who will create business opportunities for the cloud industry and win a place in the industry.

The cloud computing credit program includes a basic program for undergraduates and an advanced program for graduate students. The advanced program is not only an extension of the basic program, but also a starting point of training for graduate students. Both programs are designed to emphasize students’ hands-on abilities, including the use of debuggers, parallel and distributed programming, program monitoring and profiling, performance analysis, OS kernel code tracing and implementation, and common tools and methods in software engineering.

Approximately half of the courses in the cloud computing program are derived from the course plan of the Department of Computer Science. The added courses are compiled by professors who are experts in this field and have an interest in the program and also include some practical subjects. In addition, experts from academia and industry are invited to give speeches on major topics of cloud computing, allowing the students to grasp the current trends and developments of the cloud computing industry.

The credit program is currently in its second year and a total of 52 students have participated in the program. In addition to the courses, there are annual lecture series, visits to Delta Electronics, and various competitions and presentations, thereby fulfilling the goals of industry-university exchange and the integration of both practical and theoretical aspects of training.

Research Plans

In response to the changing trends of the technology era, and through the industry-university collaboration, we aim to develop new technologies in cloud computing that will improve the performance, expand its application, and reduce the cost. Besides setting up the credit program, technological innovation and development are also important focuses of the partnership.

There were four research projects during the first year:

• Network technology applicable for data centers, carried out by Joint Professor Li-Chun Wang.
• The use of flash memory and phase-change memory to improve the memory hierarchy suitable for cloud computing, carried out by Professor Wei-Chung Hsu.
• The design of a mechanism for observing virtual machine behavior on a cloud server to improve overall performance, carried out by Professors Tien-Fu Chen and Shiao-Li Tsao.
• The use of cryptographic techniques to effectively manage issues in cloud data storage, search and processing, carried out by Professor Rong-Jaye Chen.

In the second year, there are seven projects involving more in-depth research:

• Professor Li-Chun Wang will work on “Applications of programmable network technology on the cloud data center: the study of energy-saving routing algorithms and security mechanism with service quality assurance”.
• Professor Wei-Chung Hsu will work on “ARMvisor 3.0: A design and implementation of a KVM-based hypervisor for the ARMv8 Architecture”.
• Professor Tien-Fu Chen will work on “Analysis and study of the memory use control technique”.
• Professor Rong-Jaye Chen will work on “Encryption design and high efficiency use of cloud data”.
• Professors Wen-Chih Peng and Jiun-Long Huang will work on “Design and implementation of big data mining platform”.
• Professor Shi-Chun Tsai will work on “Building a campus cloud computing and resource management service based on NCTU OpenStack”.
• Professor I-Chen Wu will work on “Computing resource management techniques for game applications”.

         Through both the credit program and research collaboration, we expect to be able to continuously train talents in cloud computing who possess the innovative skills required by the industry. This will in turn spur the development of Taiwan’s cloud industry and strengthen Taiwan’s competitiveness