Content about cloud computing

Feature - Reaching for sky computing

Photo copyright Tom Raven, CC 2.0

Sometimes, a single cloud isn’t enough. Sometimes, you need the whole sky.
That’s why a number of researchers are developing tools to federate clouds, an architectural concept dubbed “sky computing” in a paper published in the September/October 2009 issue of IEEE Internet Computing (PDF).
“Sky computing is a tongue in cheek term for what happens when you have multiple clouds,” explained Kate Keahey of the University of Chicago, who co-authored the paper alongside University of Florida researchers Mauricio Tsugawa, Andréa Matsunaga, and José Fortes.
“[In the paper] we talked about standards and cloud markets and various mechanics that might lead to sky computing over multiple clouds, and then that idea was picked up by many projects,” Keahey added.
Among those inspired by the concept was Pierre Riteau, a doctoral student in the computer science departmen

Project Profile - From grids to clouds and beyond: GRNET supports Greek researchers

The Acropolis from Philipapou Hill at sunset, Image courtesy Tim Rogers, stock.xchng

All Greek universities get their internet from one source: GRNET (Greek Research and Education Network), a company supported by the Greek state, which connects them both to each other and to the larger pan-European academic network, GÉANT.
GRNET’s mission is to get universities on line, to provide computing power and storage, and to develop services for researchers. Not the least of which is providing technical know-how and supporting schools and universities in Greece. “GRNET is actually a human network — this is the most important thing about it,” says Kostas Koumantaros, member of GRNET in Athens. “We transfer know-how between universities throughout Greece. It is a good vehicle to both promote research in Greece and for us to learn from our international collabora

Link of the Week - Apps.gov rolls out IaaS

Image courtesy of Apps.gov.

Over a year ago the US General Services Administration launched Apps.gov, an online store where government agencies and bodies can shop for and purchase software as a service.
Now, the GSA has announced that Apps.gov will soon provide access to cloud storage, virtual machines, and other forms of Infrastructure as a Service. To learn more, read the original press release at our link of the week.
—Miriam Boon, iSGTW

Announcement - Open Source Tools Released by RESERVOIR to Support Cloud Deployment and Usage

Image courtesy RESERVOIR

Several key components of the RESERVOIR architecture are being released as open source middleware you can download from the RESERVOIR website and integrate to build your own open source cloud infrastructure.
The Claudia platform offers a Service Management toolkit to deploy and control the scalability of service among a public, private or hybrid IaaS cloud. It provides a Dashboard and a standard TCloud API based on OVF to support provisioning of PaaS and SaaS. The Claudia platform is available through the Morfeo open source community.
The Claudia platform can also be integrated with the OpenNebula cloud management framework. OpenNebula is an open source toolkit, with excellent performance and scalability to manage tens of thousands of virtual machines, with high integration capabilities to fit into any existing data center, and with the most advanced functionality for b

Announcement - UCC 2010 Call for Papers

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

Announcement - Abstracts for Symposium on Authentication Technologies for Research and Education due September 15

The Symposium on Authentication Technologies for Research and Education will continue to accept abstracts through 15 September.
The symposium and the accompanying Roundtable on Cloud and Grid Security Standards will take place Monday 4 October on the campus of Texas Tech University.
The symposium will be focused on working solutions in campus security infrastructures that can contribute to solutions for simple but effective provision of strong authentication in research, educational, government and industrial settings. Submissions are invited from members of the identity management and distributed computing security communities.
Talks will be open to the public. Participants will be given adequate time to explain and expand on their idea or project. The audience will include participants familiar with this problem and knowledgeable about working solutions in concept or in pract

Video of the Week - NoHardware.com destroys server huggers' equipment

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Back to Basics - How hardware virtualization works: Part 3

BY GREG PFISTER Since retiring from his position as an IBM Distinguished Engineer, Greg Pfister has worked as an independent consultant as well as serving as research faculty at Colorado State University. Pfister is the author of “In Search of Clusters,” and over his 30-year career, he has accrued over 30 patents in parallel computing and computer communications.

It is possible to find many explanations of hardware virtualization on the Internet and, of course, in computer science courses. Nonetheless, there remains a great deal of confusion regarding this increasingly popular technology.
This multi-part series attempts to provide an approachable explanation of hardware virtualization. You can see Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Translate, Trap and Map The basic trap and map technique described previously depends crucially on a hardware feature: the hardware must be able to trap on every instruction that could a

Back to Basics - How hardware virtualization works: Part 2

BY GREG PFISTER Since retiring from his position as an IBM Distinguished Engineer, Greg Pfister has worked as an independent consultant as well as serving as research faculty at Colorado State University. Pfister is the author of “In Search of Clusters,” and over his 30-year career, he has accrued over 30 patents in parallel computing and computer communications.

It is possible to find many explanations of hardware virtualization on the Internet and, of course, in computer science courses. Nonetheless, there remains a great deal of confusion regarding this increasingly popular technology.
This multi-part series attempts to provide an approachable explanation of hardware virtualization. You can see Part 1 here.
The Goal
The goal of hardware virtualization is to maintain, for all the code running in a virtual machine, the illusion that it is running on its own, private, stand-alone piece of hardware. What a pr

Opinion – Reports of grid’s death are greatly exaggerated

BY CRAIG LEE
Craig Lee was named President/CEO of the Open Grid Forum in October 2007. He is a Senior Scientist in the Computer Systems Research Department of The Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit research and development center funded by the US government. At the Aerospace Corporation, Lee advises civil, commercial and governmental agencies on all issues relating to high-performance parallel and distributed computing and is responsible for the transfer of maturing technologies into new application domains. This work has led naturally to Lee’s involvement in the Open Grid Forum where he was a working group chair and an area director prior to becoming president.

Last week, Amazon Web Services announced the launch of Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2, which aims to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency instances for high performance computing.
The announcement was met with a variety of responses from the

Feature - Australians launch new Compute Cloud

Image courtesy of ilco.

With the launch of their new Compute Cloud last month, the Australian Research Collaboration Service aims to bring user friendly grid and cloud computing to a whole new level.
“For the high-power HPC users, people who want to use all the features, GRISU provides a graphical user interface,” said Jim McGovern, a systems services manager at ARCS.
ARCS’ grid service GRISU, which sits atop Globus, provides Australian researchers and their colleagues with access to over 18,000 cores distributed across the nation. The Compute Cloud provides another layer, ultimately connecting researchers to the same resources GRISU accesses.
The Compute Cloud, McGovern explained, is ideally suited for less advanced users using standard packages.
As computational power has increased, computational methods have likewise become increasingly feasible for scientific disciplines not traditionally connected with grids,

Open Nebula becomes what you want

An intricate sand castle sculpture, about 10 feet (over 3 meters) high, in Victoria, Australia. Photo courtesy Wikipedia, under Creative Commons license.

As children, our sand castles were limited only by our imaginations. Sand is a great building material, making it possible to do almost whatever you wanted. It is abundant, easy to shape and, if the tower, outer wall or turret didn’t turn out as you hoped, easy to re-shape. It might not be very permanent, but for the job at hand — it worked great. The stuff of computing should be a bit more durable, but similarly flexible. The demands of today will not be the same as those of tomorrow, and the computing underpinnings should adapt as needed. Companies who manage a lot of data can now hire the support of a start-up business, C12G Labs, to help them design and construct a custom-fit cloud infrastructure. The people behind OpenNebula — an open-source toolkit to build cloud computi