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Bio

Cloud Popcorn

Present Cloud computing model is oligopoly (what is oligopoly?
) There are small number of (Cloud/Grid/CoGs/CoWs)Resource sellers or Infrastructure providers, so they can fix their own price until the ration of sellers to end users changes.
Reference link: GridEcon
Types of Cloud

• Public Cloud(Virtual machine Instances)--Grid(Physical machines)
• Private Cloud--Cluster(Grid - Virtual Organistaion)
• Hybrid Cloud--Cluster of Clusters Idle processor harvesting or CPU cycle stealing (SETI@home)

Caution

Dot Com boom (B2B on internet) was a disaster, hope not Cloud Dot Com boom is not a Infrastructure disaster

• Cloud is kind of enemy of the hardware vendors, which does not allow them to potentially sell hardware.
• Hardware is getting cheaper day by day and numbers of cores on the Desktop machine are increasing, (Intel 48Core, Intel i9/i7/i5, AMD) until one day everyone (every home) has a powerful computer equivalent to the current trend supercomputer or cloud computer.
• Then hardware will become the enemy of Software (managing and running the cloud) eventually.
• What has been said here, is just mapping the consequenses of increasing cheaper availability of powerful hardware at disposal and EaaS model ( Everything as a Servic)

Cloud: The way we see, architect and use technology of the past, present and future

a) Offloading or Outsourcing local work onto a cloud (data centers) is Cloud Computing. Reason might be local work needs more computing power, storage space or needs an elastic or on demand option to expand its resource capability.

b) Running multiple instances of operating system(s)(might be same/different - multi-tenancy) on the same physical hardware for doing STEP (a) is called Cloud Computing.

c) Extending ones capability in terms of storage, computational needs, availability, seamless access, scalability Step (a) and Step (b) helps.

d) SaaS, PaaS, IaaS are the characteristics of the cloud.

e) Resource utilization(for ROI) in Cluster / Grid computing was through harvesting of idle processor cycles via client, screensaver, conscription based for doing computations. In Cloud computing resource utilization is through running more than virtual operating systems (Windows / Linux / Mac OSX) on the same physical hardware. example: AMI (Amazon EC2).

f) Cloud is elastic and unlimited (increase and decrease resources at your finger tips) where as cluster/Grid resources are not elastic and limited.

e)

• with respect to the Cloud, the workflow of getting 1000 machines(images) or cores up and running are
• login and give your credit card details and sign up
• via their api or tools or plug-in launch 1000 machines/cores, they will be online in 15 to 18 minutes
• do your computations and shut the machines down
• get your bill
• with respect to Grid, the workflow of getting 1000 machines(real physical) or cores up and running are
• • Get your certificates from the CA manager
  • Send the CA your passport or drivers license
  • wait for a week or a month(s)
  • you may or may not get access to those machines
  • after passing a list of hurdles of who you are is who you are
  • you will get access
  • I am not sure whether you will be billed thats a plus point here

SaaS - Software as a Service
PaaS - Platform as a Service
IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service (may be Integration as a Service)

Cloud(IaaS in mind) is kind of a super mall grocery store with kitchen(for example) where one can get everything(related to cooking for example)and a platform(kitchen) to develop(in case of software/OS/application)/cook(for example) your own applications/cuisine and use their infrastructure. They also give you fire extinguisher/security for your environment(for example your kitchen). The only thing is you have to trust all the commodities available from their grocery store, you have to trust that all of your recipes are safe/safely stored in that environment. If the cloud is lost , you are lost.
Kind of liked the below picture. Image Reference:http://blog.gogrid.com/cloud-pyramid/

Nice visual divisions of the cloud: Credits to BEA Systems and Authors: Peter Laird, Kent Dickson

Green Computing/ Green Grid / Recession based Computing™

The characteristic of a software that is able to work with existing hardware/software/application infrastructure and does not need any additional specialized hardware/software as a dependency and is able make profitable return of interest(ROI) is termed as Green Computing. This kind of software enables Green Grid. Green in the sense, nothing is consumed from the environment but something under-utilized is being used. There are many definitions or variety of definitions, use the one which you are comfortable with. There might be another "terminology" on the way ( Distributed Computing --> Grid --> Cloud --> Green --> what next? )

Cloud(earlier Grid) Concept

What is Grid?

Grid is a shared collection of reliable (cluster-tightly coupled) & unreliable resources (loosely coupled machines) and interactively communicating researchers of different virtual organisations (doctors, biologists, physicists). Grid System controls and coordinates the integrity of the Grid by balancing the usage of reliable and unreliable resources among its participants providing better quality of service. It means Grid Systems are synonymous to operating systems that control, co-ordinates and schedules the resources of a system.

"In 1854, George Boole (1815-1864), Professor of Mathematics at Cork from 1849 despite having no first degree, formalised a set of such rules in the seminal work entitled, perhaps optimistically, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Boole's aim was to identify the rules of reasoning in a rigorous framework and revolutionised formal logic after thousands of years of little progress. They transformed logic from a philosophical into a mathematical discipline. These rules have subsequently become known as Boolean algebra and the design of all modern binary digital computers has depended on the results of this work. These logical operations, normally implemented as electronic gates, are all that are required to perform more complicated operations such as arithmetic." The Virtual Museum of Computing.

I'm Adarsh Patil,  was a research scholar at University College Cork. I was doing PhD under the supervision of Dr. John Morrison in the group Centre for Unified computing. I started my PhD in January 2002. and currently waiting for thesis correction and defense. I have chosen Grid computing and Cluster Computing as my research area. Most of the work in our research group is based on Condensed Graph Model of Computing, which is the work of our supervisor's PhD. Dr.John Morrison (my supervisor) was supervised by one of the three postgraduate students of Edsger W. Dijkstra.

Centre for Unified Computing (CUC) is one of the core grid and cluster computing research group in Ireland whose head and director is Dr. John Morrison. Its a part of Grid-Ireland. Other core research groups of Grid-Ireland are Grid Group from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) headed by Dr. Brian Coghlan, Grid Application group from National University of Ireland Galway(NUIG) headed by Dr. Andrew Shearer and Department of Computer Science, Queens University Belfast(Northern Ireland) headed by Prof.Ron Perrott.

Our core research work is on WebCom, whose chief architects are Dr. John Morrison , Dr David Power , Dr. James Kennedy , Dr. Keith Power and other researchers (Adarsh, Padraig, Brian, Sunil, Philip, Neil, John O' Regan, Tom, Barry, Max and Hongbin) of the group are currently building their research work around it. There is a security team in this research group headed by Dr. Simon Foley. Their security models are based on condensed graph model. We are all currently working with other research groups across Ireland on a project called WebCom-G.