I’ve been wanting to say a few words about sky computing for a while and eventually iSGTW forestalled me with a very nice article on the topic. It describes a cool work by Nimbus committer Pierre Riteau who created a virtual cluster of over a thousand cores over resources leased from six Nimbus clouds: three provided by Grid’5000 and three by FutureGrid.
“Sky computing” was a name we coined back in 2008 to describe the idea of operating in a multi-cloud environment. It addresses the issues of provider interoperability and comparison between providers (cloud markets) as well as end-user concerns – the abstractions and tools required to provide an integrated and secure environment over resources provisioned in multiple potentially distributed clouds which the original paper focused on.
Pierre’s work pushes the limits of this concept in terms of scale: distributing more images to more distributed clouds for longer sustained leases obtained faster. He started out with a Grid5000 Large Scale Deployment Challenge award earlier this year for managing deployment of hundreds, and by mid-summer was investigating the properties of distributed clusters of thousands of cores. I can’t wait to see what happens next ;-).
More information about Pierre’s sky computing ventures can be found in his TeraGrid 2010 poster and the recent ERCIM article.
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