Dr. Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at LUMS SBASSE, and Dr. Zartash Afzal Uzmi, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, have won the Higher Education Commission (HEC) grant of PKR 5.6 Million. This two-year award entitled, “A High Performance Cloud Data Centre Architecture Using Software-Defined Networks”, will allow Dr. Qazi (PI) and Dr. Uzmi (Co-PI) to lead efforts for the design of a next-generation architecture for building cloud data enters.

Cloud data enters form a critical infrastructure for hosting large-scale online applications such as web search (e.g., Google Search, Bing), social networking (Facebook, Twitter), and advertising systems (e.g., Google AdWords). Coupled with the emergence of cloud computing, service providers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, data enters have emerged as a primary platform for managing users’ computation, storage, and communication requirements

The funded research project aims to (a) design a high performance cloud data enter network architecture based on Software-Defined Networks (SDN) to address critical challenges of performance and efficiency in existing cloud data enters, (b) design a scalable and low-complexity framework for monitoring and managing cloud resources, and (c) build a prototype to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.