IEEE CLOUD 2010 Conference, Day 5

Interesting talks from Day 5:

Keynote: Thinking outside the Box: How Cloud, Grid, and Services Can Make Us Smarter? by Ian Foster (Argonne National Lab and University of Chicago).
Ian was one of the pioneers of the grid and his talk was mostly focused on how e-science researchers are using the grid to do their experiments and archive their data. He briefly talked about the efforts underway by the Globus project to develop Sci-SaaS (to provide software-as-a-service for scientists). The link between his talk and cloud computing was that the cloud provides scientists with scalable hosting for their applications and data. One of the interesting points that Ian made was this: one of the main lessons that they learned from grid computing was that the social and human issues to do with using the grid and incentives for sharing are really important. These issues need to be explored by researchers in the cloud to prevent the same barriers (that were faced by the grid community) slowing cloud adoption.

A Case for Consumer-Centric Resource Accounting Models (CLOUD2010-3064)
Ahmed Mihoob, Carlos Molina-Jimenez, Santosh Shrivastava (Newcastle University, UK)
A detailed account of how AWS charge for their storage, down to the fine details that are not mentioned in AWS’s website, they discovered these details by doing experiments on S3.

An Architecture for Public and Open Submission Systems in the Cloud (CLOUD2010-3065)
Marcello Azambuja, Rafael Pereira, Karin Breitman (Globo.com; PUC-Rio, Rio Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
This talk was about a conceptual architecture that is used for video processing and streaming where there are high-peaks at certain times (e.g. people submitting their trial videos for Big Brother in Brazil where people submit their video using a website to the judges, but people leave it late before they submit so there is often a very high peak just before the deadline). This type of architecture has also been documented in AWS’s whitepapers.

On-Demand Dynamic Security for Risk-Based Secure Collaboration in Clouds (CLOUD2010-3066)
Michael Boniface, Mike Surridge, Martin Hall-May, Stuart Bertram, Neil Briscombe (University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre, QinetiQ Ltd)
This talk was about a platform and lifecycle that can be used to model a system, its security policies and certain events with the aim of modeling security threats to support decision making. The lifecycle involves security planning, security provisioning, active threat identification and threat assessment. I’m not too sure where the cloud relation is in this work.