Case Study: Hokkaido University accelerates R&D and reduces server costs with Citrix CloudPlatform and XenServer

Hokkaido University strengthens R&D with its Academic Cloud built on Citrix CloudPlatform and Citrix XenServer

Hokkaido University’s Information Initiative Center faced rising installation, power and labor costs and inefficient, manual operations from maintaining separate physical servers in multiple research rooms. The center wanted a centralized, on‑campus infrastructure to improve efficiency, simplify management, speed provisioning and support collaboration among researchers across Japan.

The team built an Academic Cloud using Citrix XenServer for virtualization and Citrix CloudPlatform for cloud management, creating a portal via CloudPlatform APIs. The >40‑teraflop environment can host over 2,000 virtual servers, enables users to provision VMs in about 10 minutes, lowers management overhead and costs, and sets the stage for future connectivity with other universities’ academic clouds.

Hokkaido University

Masaharu Munetomo

Associate Professor in Engineering, Large-scale Computer Systems Research Division Information Initiative Center,Hokkaido University