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Overview of the 2009 IEEE Workshop on Cloud Computing

 

Venue
 :
Groningen, The Netherlands
Conference Dates
 :
June 29 - July 1, 2009
Organizer
 :
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Language
 :
English
Summary of Proceedings
 :
Download pdf here

 

 

WETICE is an annual international forum for state-of-the-art research in enabling technologies for collaboration, consisting of a number of cognate workshops. This year - for the first time, WETICE2009 included a special workshop on "Collaboration and Cloud Computing".

 

The 1st International Workshop on Collaboration & Cloud Computing was held in the 395 year old University in Groningen, Netherlands between June 29 - July 1, 2009 and chaired by Dr. Rao Mikkilineni, CTO of KawaObjects. About 30 participants represented various universities and industry R&D organizations from North America, Europe, Asia and the African continent.

 

Broadly speaking Cloud Computing represents the desire to migrate from the traditional server-centric computing architecture to a totally network-centric computing architecture where logical computing resources can be assembled on demand. This shift offers a fresh opportunity to rethink existing architectures in order to optimize end-to-end business services creation, delivery and assurance. The objective of the workshop was to analyze current trends in Cloud Computing and identify long-term research themes and facilitate collaboration in future research in the field that will ultimately enable global advancements in the field that are not dictated or driven by the prototypical short term profit driven motives of a particular corporate entity.

 

The conference started with an overview of the state-of-the-art and a proposal for the creation of a cloud services engineering discipline in the keynote speech by Prof. Stefan Tai of Karlsruhe University and ex-IBM Research Staff Member. To quote Prof. Tai - “We argue that the tremendous potential of Clouds lies in making effective use of Clouds as a distributed computing model in a business context, and that therefore the development of Cloud Services must incorporate valuation in terms of business criteria. Further, a rich ecosystem of Cloud Services (and corresponding providers and consumers) exists, which forms a highly dynamic environment to develop, test, deploy and operate Cloud Services. Compositions and configurations of select Cloud Services for business purposes constitute a service-oriented business value network (SVN)”.

 

The Cloud Computing session started with opening remarks from the Chair observing that the computing cloud evolution depends on research efforts from the infrastructure providers creating next generation hardware that is service friendly, service infrastructure developers that embed business service intelligence in the network to create distributed business workflow execution services and service providers who assure service delivery on a massive scale with global interoperability. Current architecture and evolution of the cloud is increasing datacenter complexity by piling up new layers of management over the many layers that already exist.

 

Nine papers discussed various aspects of present and future cloud computing directions and Jim Baty from SUN presented a talk on cloud service creation and role of patterns.

 

A lively discussion followed on the evolution of clouds:

  • Is the cloud just an XaaS stack or is there more to it?
  • Is Unified Computing simply throwing servers, network and storage in blades?
  • Are lessons from the past i.e. from telecommunications and from the Internet, relevant to enabling massively scalable and global interoperable clouds?
  • How can infrastructure hardware vendors accelerate cloud deployment by including service enabling features
  • Is the current trend in throwing multiple OSes inside the server and including another networking abstraction layer that bridges these OSes the right model or should we look at a new network centric operating system that allows dynamic composition of distributed physical computing resources based on latency tolerance of services consuming the logical resources?
  • Can we accelerate the creation of Computing Clouds through fresh ideas such as the concept of a virtual infrastructure fabric, a management services fabric and a business services fabric?

 

The papers and the discussion have evolved into a suggestion for future research in the flowing Areas:

 

  • Hardware assistance to dynamically compose computing, network and storage resources to create logical resource pools that meet service requirements of the resource consumers such as latency tolerance, response time, throughput, bandwidth etc.
  • An operating system that allows the composition of logical resources dynamically by matching the hardware infrastructure capabilities and the resource consumer profiles
  • A service creation infrastructure that allows composition and assembly of logical resources to create business workflows and
  • A service management fabric that also is an assembly of logical resources to assure service delivery

 

The above themes will be carried into the future for further analysis and research. A document with an overview of the proceeding containing additional notes is available for download here.