Application Information Services for Distributed Computing Environments
Grant Agreement Number PIRG08-GA-2010-277144
About the project
Coordinator: Karolj Skala, Ruđer Bošković Institute
PEOPLE MARIE CURIE ACTIONS
Incoming International Fellowships (IIF)
Call: FP7-PEOPLE-2010-RG
Start date: 1st June 2011
End date: 31st May 2015
The term cloud computing has been introduced in late 2007 and became widely acceptable in early 2008. It started with the establishment of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Over the past two years, every major computer vendor has made a significant effort to participate and provide cloud computing services (e.g., Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Sun Cloud, Google App Engine). By many, cloud computing is seen as the future of computing where, rather than owning and managing resources, one simply obtains access to needed services allowing easy resource scaling and reduced infrastructure maintenance. As this trend continues and additional service providers emerge, competition between services providers will raise. It will become imperative for the service providers to maximize utilization of their resources and provide desirable QoS to its users. In order for this to happen, users will need an ability to easily and coherently compare offered services. This can be realized only if there is sufficient data about individual providers and received services as well as if the data is in a standardized and portable format.
Parallel to the commercial efforts, cloud computing has attracted considerable attention from the academic community. International workshops and conferences (e.g., CloudCom 2010 , Cloud 2010 , Cloud Computing and Virtualization 2010 ) are emerging to provide collaborative opportunities and support for sharing research ideas. Lastly, national funding agencies are starting to support cloud research ideas; the primary example is the IBM RESERVOIR (Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers) project , a EU-funded initiative with 13 partners, representing the largest academic effort with the aim of provisioning cloud computing services to a wider community in an efficient and cost effective way.
