In this issue of XRDS, we look at how computer users, businesses, researchers, and scientists are Plugging into the Cloud. In this issue, you'll find introductory articles on cloud computing, as well more detailed analytical views of security concerns related to the cloud, research questions, business implications, and more.
After reading this issue, I had to seriously reevaluate my perception and definition of cloud computing. Unsurprisingly, given the wide array of computing models it encompasses, agreement among even experts is somewhat elusive.
By Chris Harrison
By David Chiu
By Ryan K. L. Ko
Computers continue to get faster exponentially, but the computational demands of science are growing even faster. Extreme requirements arise in at least three areas.
By David P. Anderson
Despite its promise, most cloud computing innovations have been almost exclusively driven by a few industry leaders, such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and IBM. The involvement of a wider research community, both in academia and industrial labs, has so far been patchy without a clear agenda. In our opinion, the limited participation stems from the prevalent view that clouds are mostly an engineering and business-oriented phenomenon based on stitching together existing technologies and tools.
By Ymir Vigfusson, Gregory Chockler
In recent years, empirical science has been evolving from physical experimentation to computation-based research. In astronomy, researchers seldom spend time at a telescope, but instead access the large number of image databases that are created and curated by the community [42]. In bioinformatics, data repositories hosted by entities such as the National Institutes of Health [29] provide the data gathered by Genome-Wide Association Studies and enable researchers to link particular genotypes to a variety of diseases.
By Gideon Juve, Ewa Deelman
By Sumit Narayan, Chris Heiden
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. With this pay-as-you-go model of computing, cloud solutions are seen as having the potential to both dramatically reduce costs and increase the rapidity of development of applications.
By Ramaswamy Chandramouli, Peter Mell
At the turn of the 20th century, companies stopped generating their own power and plugged into the electricity grid. In his now famous book The Big Switch, Nick Carr analogizes those events of a hundred years ago to the tectonic shift taking place in the technology industry today.
By Guy Rosen
