Building Green Systems with Green Students: An Educational Experiment with GENI Infrastructure

Experimentation in system-oriented courses is often challenging, due to the raw and complex nature of the underlying infrastructure. In this work, we present our findings in teaching cloud computing to upper-level and graduate level students with GENI testbeds that are in use by the distributed systems community. The possibility of giving students practical and relevant experience was explored in the context of new course assignment objectives. Furthermore, students were able to explore systems concepts using GENI testbeds, and contribute to a collaborative class wide project with medium scale computation using satellite data. Our proposed set of experiments and course project provide a basis for an evaluation of the trade-offs of teaching cloud and distributed systems. However, the software engineering challenges in these environments proved to be daunting. The amount of installation, configuration, and maintenance of their experiments was more than what students anticipated. The challenges the students faced drove them towards more traditional local development than attempting to work on the testbeds we presented. We hope that our findings provide insight into some of the possibilities to consider when preparing the next generation of computer scientists to engage with software practices and paradigms that are already fundamental in today's highly distributed systems.