5 Cool Cloud Computing Research Projects

The HotCloud conference on cloud computing in San Diego will showcase a number of research projects. One such project is a Trusted Cloud Computing Platform developed by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems that "enables Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon EC2 to provide a closed box execution environment that guarantees confidential execution of guest virtual machines (VMs)." The platform would guarantee customers that their data has not been interfered with by service providers while also allowing service providers to secure data even across many VMs. Meanwhile, University of Washington researchers are exploiting the fact that Web services and applications will be very closely situated to develop CloudViews, a common storage system designed "to facilitate collaboration through protected inter-service data sharing." University of Minnesota researchers have outlined a way to form nebulas from distributed voluntary resources that could provide greater scalability, more geographical dispersion of nodes, and lower cost than traditional managed clouds. Researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz, NetApp, and Pergamum Systems are considering the trade-offs between storing data and recalculating results as needed in an attempt to boost the efficiency of cloud computing. They write in a paper that "recomputation as a replacement for storage fits well into the holistic model of computing described by the cloud architecture. With its dynamically scalable and virtualized architecture, cloud computing aims to abstract away the details of underlying infrastructure. In both public and private clouds, the user is encouraged to think in terms of services, not structure."
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