Abstract:The cloud can be a highly attractive computing utility to conduct hands-on lab exercises and research experiments. In academia, the cloud can offer instructors and students (whether local or at a distance) on-demand, dedicated, isolated, unlimited, and easily configurable machines. Such an approach has clear advantages over access to machines in a classic lab setting. In this tutorial, we show how existing cloud services and infrastructure can be harnessed in general to facilitate teaching and research. The tutorial will offer numerous live demos and hands-on activities for participants on how to access and manage the cloud resources, setup student accounts, build and bake Linux and Windows instances, and design a variety of cloud-based lab exercises and research experiments for many topics related to computer networks, cybersecurity, HPC, and Big Data.

Khaled Salah is a full professor at the ECE Department, Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, UAE. He received the B.S. degree in Computer Engineering with a minor in Computer Science from Iowa State University, USA, in 1990, the M.S. degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology, USA, in 1994, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the same institution in 2000.  Khaled has been teaching graduate and undergraduate courses and has over 135 publications in the areas of cloud computing, computer and network security, operating systems, and computer networks. Khaled has been using the cloud for teaching and research for the past five years and had given a number of invited talks, tutorials, and seminars on cloud computing. Khaled has been the program chair for IEEE CloudNA 2015 and CloudNA 2016  http://www.ieee-cloudna.org.