Cloud Highlights from CCGrid 2011

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A few weeks ago (May 23rd-26th) I traveled to sunny Newport Beach, California to present a paper, Improving Utilization of Infrastructure Clouds, at CCGrid 2011. Our paper addresses one of the main challenges faced by infrastructure cloud providers: ensuring that resources are utilized efficiently while still providing resources on-demand. To solve this catch-22, we deployed… Read more »

Science Cloud 2011

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I had the privilege of presenting Cumulus: Open Source Storage Cloud for  Science at the Science Cloud 2011 workshop yesterday.  While I was focused on our open source S3 implementation ideal for the extensibility and scientific experimentation, many other interesting topics were presented. Shane Canon present a very interesting look at common misconceptions about the… Read more »

Mohammad and the Mountain

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Will the mountain come to the Mohammad or Mohammad go to the mountain? When we consider whether clouds can provide a suitable platform for high performance computing (HPC) we always talk about how cloud computing needs to evolve to suit the needs of HPC – in other words will the mountain come to Mohammad. But… Read more »

Cloud Highlights from Supercomputing 2010

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Happy Thanksgiving! Last week (Nov 13-19) was the annual Supercomputing (SC) conference. This year it was held in New Orleans, Louisiana. Cloud computing was featured by vendors and speakers throughout the conference. There were far too many cool products, talks, and papers to mention in a single post, however, a few of the highlights that… Read more »

Sky Computing

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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… Read more »

Grids versus Clouds

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The issue of how exactly cloud computing differs from grid computing was responsible for much controversy in the last year. Here are my two cents on how Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing and grid computing are different (also discussed in the Sky Computing paper) At some level, both cloud computing and grid computing represent the idea… Read more »

Cloud Computing and Bioinformatics: Notes from a Workshop

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I recently attended an immensely interesting workshop on using cloud computing for systems biology computations. The workshop was co-held with SC09. The agenda and the presentations are available online from the workshop pages and are well worth a look. Here are some impressions from the workshop. The workshop began with a discussion of current challenges… Read more »

Welcome to scienceclouds.org

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Today we are moving Science Clouds to its own web pages. In addition to enabling quite a few exploratory projects, the Science Clouds to date served as a bit of a “cloud clinic” where various folks interested in using cloud computing for a scientific project would contact us and get advice and help on how… Read more »