This paper discusses the concept of Cloud Computing to achieve a complete definition of what a Cloud is, using the main characteristics typically associated with this paradigm in the literature. More than 20 definitions have been studied allowing for the extraction of a consensus definition as well as a minimum definition containing the essential characteristics. This paper pays much attention to the Grid paradigm, as it is often confused with Cloud technologies. We also describe the relationships and distinctions between the Grid and Cloud approaches.

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A break in the clouds: towards a cloud definition

Summary: We have implemented a high-performance computing (HPC) version of ProtTest that can be executed in parallel in multicore desktops and clusters. This version, called ProtTest 3, includes new features and extended capabilities.

Availability: ProtTest 3 source code and binaries are freely available under GNU license for download from http://darwin.uvigo.es/software/prottest3, linked to a Mercurial repository at Bitbucket (https://bitbucket.org/).

Contact: dposada@uvigo.es

Supplementary information:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

ProtTest 3

The evolution of cloud computing over the past few years is potentially one of the major advances in the history of computing. However, if cloud computing is to achieve its potential, there needs to be a clear understanding of the various issues involved, both from the perspectives of the providers and the consumers of the technology. While a lot of research is currently taking place in the technology itself, there is an equally urgent need for understanding the business-related issues surrounding cloud computing. In this article, we identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the cloud computing industry. We then identify the various issues that will affect the different stakeholders of cloud computing. We also issue a set of recommendations for the practitioners who will provide and manage this technology. For IS researchers, we outline the different areas of research that need attention so that we are in a position to advice the industry in the years to come. Finally, we outline some of the key issues facing governmental agencies who, due to the unique nature of the technology, will have to become intimately involved in the regulation of cloud computing.

Cloud computing - The business perspective

Summary: We have implemented a High Performance Computing (HPC) version of ProtTest (Abascal et al., 2007) that can be executed in parallel in multi-core desktops and clusters. This version, called ProtTest 3, includes new features and extended capabilities. Availability: ProtTest 3 source code and binaries are freely available under GNU license for download fromhttp://darwin.uvigo.es/ software/prottest3, linked to a Mercurial repository at Bitbucket

ProtTest 3: fast selection of best-t models of protein evolution

SUMMARY Clusters, Grids, and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have emerged as popular paradigms for next generation parallel and distributed computing. They enable aggregation of distributed resources for solving largescale problems in science, engineering, and commerce. In Grid and P2P computing environments, the resources are usually geographically distributed in multiple administrative domains, managed and owned by different organizations with different policies, and interconnected by wide-area networks or the Internet. This introduces a number of resource management and application scheduling challenges in the domain of security, resource and policy heterogeneity, fault tolerance, continuously changing resource conditions, and politics. The resource management and scheduling systems for Grid computing need to manage resources and application execution depending on either resource consumers’ or owners’ requirements, and continuously adapt to changes in resource availability. The management of resources and scheduling of applications in such large-scale distributed systems is a complex undertaking. In order to prove the effectiveness of resource brokers and associated scheduling algorithms, their performance needs to be evaluated under different scenarios such as varying number of resources and users with different requirements. In a Grid environment, it is hard and even impossible to perform scheduler performance evaluation in a repeatable and controllable manner as resources and users are distributed across multiple organizations with their own policies. To overcome this limitation, we have developed a Java-based discrete-event Grid simulation toolkit called GridSim. The toolkit supports modeling and simulation of heterogeneous Grid resources (both time- and space-shared), users and application models. It provides primitives for creation of application tasks, mapping of tasks to resources, and their management. To demonstrate suitability of the GridSim toolkit, we have simulated a Nimrod-G

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GridSim: a toolkit for the modeling and simulation of distributed resource management and scheduling for Grid computing

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in commodity computer and network performance, mainly as a result of faster hardware and more sophisticated software. Nevertheless, there are still problems, in the fields of science, engineering, and business, which cannot be effectively dealt with using the current generation of supercomputers. In fact, due to their size and complexity, these problems are often very numerically and/or data intensive and consequently require a variety of heterogeneous resources that are not available on a single machine. A number of teams have conducted experimental studies on the cooperative use of geographically distributed resources unified to act as a single powerful computer. This new approach is known by several names, such as metacomputing, scalable computing, global computing, Internet computing, and more recently peer-to-peer or Grid computing. The early efforts in Grid computing started as a project to link supercomputing sites, but have now grown far beyond their original intent. In fact, many applications can benefit from the Grid infrastructure, including collaborative engineering, data exploration, high-throughput computing, and of course distributed supercomputing. Moreover, due to the rapid growth of the Internet and Web, there has been a rising interest in Web-based distributed computing, and many projects have been started and aim to exploit the Web as an infrastructure for running coarse-grained distributed and parallel applications. In this context, the Web has the capability to be a platform for parallel and collaborative work as well as a key technology to create a pervasive and ubiquitous Grid-based infrastructure. This paper aims to present the state-of-the-art of Grid computing and attempts to survey the major international efforts in developing this emerging technology.

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Grids and grid technologies for wide-area distributed computing

This invaluable text provides a complete, clear, systematic, and practical understanding of the technologies that enable the Grid. The authors outline all the components necessary to create a Grid infrastructure that enables support for a range of wide-area distributed applications. The Grid: Core Technologies takes a pragmatic approach with numerous practical examples of software in context. It describes the middleware components of the Grid step-by-step, and gives hands-on advice on designing and building a Grid environment with the Globus Toolkit, as well as writing applications

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The Grid: Core Technologies

A basic prerequisite for parallel programming is a good communication API The recent interest in using Java for scientific and engineering application has led to several international efforts to produce a message passing interface to support parallel computation In this paper we describe and then discuss the syntax, functionality and performance of one such interface, mpiJava, an object-oriented Java interface to MPI We first discuss the design of the mpiJava API and the issues associated with its development We then more on to briefly outline the steps necessary to ‘port’ mpiJava onto a range of operating systems, including Windows NT, Linux and Solaris In the second part of the paper we present and then discuss some performance measurements made of communications bandwidth and latency to compare mpiJava on these systems Finally, we summarise our experiences and then briefly mention work that we plan to undertake

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MPIJAVA: An Object-Oriented JAVA Interface to MPI

The Grid: International Efforts in Global Computing

Cluster computing is not a new area of computing. It is, however, evident that there is a growing interest in its usage in all areas where applications have traditionally used parallel or distributed computing platforms. The growing interest has been fuelled in part by the availability of powerful microprocessors and high-speed networks as off-the-shelf commodity components as well as in part by the rapidly maturing software components available to support high performance and high availability applications. 
This White Paper has been broken down into eleven sections, each of which has been put together by academics and industrial researchers who are both experts in their fields and where willing to volunteer their time and effort to put together this White Paper. The status of this paper is draft and we are at the stage of publicizing its presence and making a Request For Comments (RFC).

Mark Baker

Papers

Grids and grid technologies for wide-area distributed computing

The Grid: Core Technologies

MPIJAVA: An Object-Oriented JAVA Interface to MPI

The Grid: International Efforts in Global Computing

Cluster Computing White Paper