The T. Nagar market area, pictured above, is among the busiest in Chennai. Image courtesy of McKay Savage.

The First International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2010) is now accepting papers, due 30 September 2010.

The conference will take place 14–16 December in Chennai, India.

Computing is being transformed to a model consisting of services that are commoditized and delivered in a manner similar to traditional utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services based on their requirements without regard to where the services are hosted or how they are delivered. Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility computing vision and these include Grid computing, and more recently Cloud computing.

Cloud computing has recently emerged as one of the buzzwords in the ICT industry. Several IT vendors are promising to offer storage, application and computation hosting services, and provide coverage in several continents, offering Service-Level Agreements (SLA) backed performance and uptime promises for their services. While these “clouds” are the natural evolution of traditional clusters and data centres, they are distinguished by following a “utility” pricing model where customers are charged based on their utilisation of computational resources, storage and transfer of data. These emerging services have reduced the cost of computation, application hosting and content storage and delivery by several orders of magnitude, however there is significant complexity involved in ensuring applications, services and data can scale when needed to ensure consistent and reliable operation under peak loads.

To provide a dedicated forum for sharing recent R&D advances and industrial innovations in “Utility Computing” area, we have initiated this new conference series “International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing”. This conference series has emerged out of the past two successful Cloud computing symposiums (Cloud 2009 held in Shanghai, China; and Cloud 2010 held in Melbourne, Australia) and focuses on both principles of “Utility computing” and its practical realization in industry in different forms including Cloud Computing.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Principles of Utility Computing
• Architectural Models for Utility Computing
• *aaS: Infrastructure, Platform, Software, Storage as a Service
• Novel architectural models for cloud computing
• Novel applications of cloud computing, including games and social networks
• Novel cloud programming models
• Innovative cloud pricing models
• Innovative cloud service models
• Support for scalable and elastic cloud services
• New parallel / concurrent programming models for cloud computing
• Cloud support for mobile applications and Content Delivery Networks
• Data Security, Privacy, and Jurisdiction in the Cloud
• Portability of applications and data between different cloud providers
• Cloud-related virtualization issues
• Deployment, maintenance, and management of cloud resources and services
• (Multi-)Cloud resource brokering and scheduling
• (Multi-)Cloud capacity planning
• Reliability of applications and services running on the cloud
• Interoperability between different Utility Computing Platforms including Grids, and Clouds
• Performance monitoring for cloud applications
• Cloud use case studies
• Scientific computing in the cloud
• Business computing in the cloud
• Social computing in the cloud

Best Paper Award

A best paper award sponsored by Manjrasoft Pty. Ltd, Australia will be presented to a paper receiving the highest quality rating from the Program Committee and external reviewers. In addition, a special issue in a high quality international journal will be organised for selected best papers.

Paper Submission

Authors are invited to submit papers electronically. Submitted manuscripts should be structured as technical papers and may not exceed 8 (“eight”) letter size (8.5 x 11) pages including figures, tables and references using the IEEE format for conference proceedings (print area of 6-1/2 inches (16.51 cm)wide by 8-7/8 inches (22.51 cm) high, two-column format with columns 3-1/16 inches (7.85 cm)wide with a 3/8 inch (0.81 cm) space between them, single-spaced 10-point Times fully justified text). Submissions not conforming to these guidelines may be returned without review. Authors should submit the manuscript in PDF format and make sure that the file will print on a printer that uses letter size (8.5 x 11) paper. The official language of the meeting is English. All manuscripts will be reviewed and will be judged on correctness, originality, technical strength, significance, quality of presentation, and interest and relevance to the conference attendees.

Submitted papers must represent original unpublished research that is not currently under review for any other conference or journal. Papers not following these guidelines will be rejected without review and further action may be taken, including (but not limited to) notifications sent to the heads of the institutions of the authors and sponsors of the conference.

Submissions received after the due date, exceeding length limit, or not appropriately structured may also not be considered. The proceedings will be published and will be made online through the IEEE Xplore.

All papers should be submitted online using EasyChair submission system: http://www.easychair.org/