Search Results for « Cloud Computing »

Cloud computing is today’s most emphasized Information and Communications Technology (ICT) paradigm that is directly or indirectly used by almost every online user. However, such great significance comes with the support of a great infrastructure that includes large data centers comprising thousands of server units and other supporting equipment. Their share in power consumption generates between 1.1% and 1.5% of the total electricity use worldwide and is projected to rise even more. Such alarming numbers demand rethinking the energy efficiency of such infrastructures. However, before making any changes to infrastructure, an analysis of the current status is required. In this article, we perform a comprehensive analysis of an infrastructure supporting the cloud computing paradigm with regards to energy efficiency. First, we define a systematic approach for analyzing the energy efficiency of most important data center domains, including server and network equipment, as well as cloud management systems and appliances consisting of a software utilized by end users. Second, we utilize this approach for analyzing available scientific and industrial literature on state-of-the-art practices in data centers and their equipment. Finally, we extract existing challenges and highlight future research directions.

During the past few years, cloud computing has become a key IT buzzword.Although the definition of cloud computing is still "cloudy", the trade press and bloggers label many vendors as cloud computing vendors, and report on their services and issues.Cloud computing is in its infancy in terms of market adoption.However, it is a key IT megatrend that will take root.This article reviews its definition and status, adoption issues, and provides a glimpse of its future and discusses technical issues that are expected to be addressed. STATUSPerhaps the simplest working definition of cloud computing is "being able to access files, data, programs and 3 rd party services from a Web browser via the Internet that are hosted by a 3 rd party provider"[Hodson08] and "paying only for the computing resources and services used".Often cloud computing is used synonymously, inaccurately in my view, with such terms as utility computing (or on-demand computing), software as a service (SaaS), and grid computing.Of these, as I will show below, utility computing and SaaS are merely two of several forms of service cloud computing can provide.Grid computing is simply one type of underlying technologies for implementing cloud computing.The term "cloud" in cloud computing is used synomously with "data center".Today the computing field is able to envision transitioning into the cloud computing era because of the breath-taking advances in computing and information technologies during the past three decades.The advances include the buildup of the Internet backbone, the widespread adoption of broadband access to the Internet, the powerful network of servers and storage in data centers, the advances in high performance and scalable software infrastructure for the data centers and the Web, etc.The architecture of a cloud includes several key modules [Wikipedia]: user interaction interface, system resource management module with a services catalog, and resource provisioning module.The system resource management module manages a massive network of servers running in parallel.Often it also uses virtualization techniques to dynamically allocate and deallocate computing resources.

As DNA sequencing outpaces improvements in computer speed, there is a critical need to accelerate tasks like alignment and SNP calling. Crossbow is a cloud-computing software tool that combines the aligner Bowtie and the SNP caller SOAPsnp. Executing in parallel using Hadoop, Crossbow analyzes data comprising 38-fold coverage of the human genome in three hours using a 320-CPU cluster rented from a cloud computing service for about $85. Crossbow is available from http://bowtie-bio.sourceforge.net/crossbow/.

Cloud computing has become another buzzword after Web 2.0. However, there are dozens of different definitions for cloud computing and there seems to be no consensus on what a cloud is. On the other hand, cloud computing is not a completely new concept; it has intricate connection to the relatively new but thirteen-year established grid computing paradigm, and other relevant technologies such as utility computing, cluster computing, and distributed systems in general. This paper strives to compare and contrast cloud computing with grid computing from various angles and give insights into the essential characteristics of both.

"Cloud" computing – a relatively recent term, builds on decades of research in virtualization, distributed computing, utility computing, and more recently networking, web and software services. It implies a service oriented architecture, reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, great flexibility, reduced total cost of ownership, on-demand services and many other things. This paper discusses the concept of “cloud” computing, some of the issues it tries to address, related research topics, and a “cloud” implementation available today.

Abstract Cloud computing has recently emerged as a new paradigm for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. Cloud computing is attractive to business owners as it eliminates the requirement for users to plan ahead for provisioning, and allows enterprises to start from the small and increase resources only when there is a rise in service demand. However, despite the fact that cloud computing offers huge opportunities to the IT industry, the development of cloud computing technology is currently at its infancy, with many issues still to be addressed. In this paper, we present a survey of cloud computing, highlighting its key concepts, architectural principles, state-of-the-art implementation as well as research challenges. The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the design challenges of cloud computing and identify important research directions in this increasingly important area.

Cloud computing allows computer users to conveniently rent access to fully featured applications, to software development and deployment environments, and to computing infrastructure assets such as network-accessible data storage and processing.This document reprises the NIST-established definition of cloud computing, describes cloud computing benefits and open issues, presents an overview of major classes of cloud technology, and provides guidelines and recommendations on how organizations should consider the relative opportunities and risks of cloud computing.Cloud computing has been the subject of a great deal of commentary.Attempts to describe cloud computing in general terms, however, have been problematic because cloud computing is not a single kind of system, but instead spans a spectrum of underlying technologies, configuration possibilities, service models, and deployment models.This document describes cloud systems and discusses their strengths and weaknesses.Depending on an organization's requirements, different technologies and configurations are appropriate.To understand which part of the spectrum of cloud systems is most appropriate for a given need, an organization should consider how clouds can be deployed (deployment models), what kinds of services can be provided to customers (service models), the economic opportunities and risks of using cloud services (economic considerations), the technical characteristics of cloud services such as performance and reliability (operational characteristics), typical terms of service (service level agreements), and the security opportunities and risks (security).Deployment Models.A cloud computing system may be deployed privately or hosted on the premises of a cloud customer, may be shared among a limited number of trusted partners, may be hosted by a third party, or may be a publically accessible service, i.e., a public cloud.Depending on the kind of cloud deployment, the cloud may have limited private computing resources, or may have access to large quantities of remotely accessed resources.The different deployment models present a number of tradeoffs in how customers can control their resources, and the scale, cost, and availability of resources. Service Models.A cloud can provide access to software applications such as email or office productivity tools (the Software as a Service, or SaaS, service model), or can provide an environment for customers to use to build and operate their own software (the Platform as a Service, or PaaS, service model), or can provide network access to traditional computing resources such as processing power and storage (the Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, service model).The different service models have different strengths and are suitable for different customers and business objectives.Generally, interoperability and portability of customer workloads is more achievable in the IaaS service model because the building blocks of IaaS offerings are relatively well-defined, e.g., network protocols, CPU instruction sets, and legacy device interfaces. Economic Considerations.In outsourced and public deployment models, cloud computing provides convenient rental of computing resources: users pay service charges while using a service but need not pay large up-front acquisition costs to build a computing infrastructure.The reduction of up-front costs reduces the risks for pilot projects and experimental efforts, thus reducing a barrier to organizational flexibility, or agility.In outsourced and public deployment models, cloud computing also can provide elasticity, that is, the ability for customers to quickly request, receive, and later release as many resources as needed.By using an elastic cloud, customers may be able to avoid excessive costs from overprovisioning, i.e., building enough capacity for peak demand and then not using the capacity in non-peak periods.Whether or not cloud computing reduces overall costs for an organization depends on a careful analysis of all the costs of operation, compliance, and security, including costs to migrate to and, if necessary, migrate from a cloud.