Daily Practice_Cloud Computer

Abstract

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm. It aims to share data, calculations, and services transpar-ently among users of a massive grid. Although the industry has started selling cloud-computing products, research challenges in various areas, such as UI design, task decomposition, task distribution, and task coordinat-ion, are still unclear. Therefore, we study the methods to reason and model cloud computing as a step toward identifying fundamental research questions in this para-digm. In this paper, we compare cloud computing with service computing and pervasive computing. Both the industry and research community have actively examined these three computing paradigms. We draw a qualitative comparison among them based on the classic model of computer architecture. We finally evaluate the compar-ison results and draw up a series of research questions in cloud computing for future exploration.

Introduction

Cloud computing is a paradigm that focuses on sharing data and computations over a scalable network of nodes.Cloud computing is a paradigm that focuses on sharing data and computations over a scalable network of nodes.

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Examples of such nodes include end user computers, data centers, and Web Services. We term such a network of nodes as a cloud. An application based on such clouds is taken as a cloud application.

This paradigm is increasingly popular in the industry, where industrial leaders such as Microsoft [26], Google [2], and IBM [5] strongly promote the paradigm in recent years. An early attempt to formulate cloud computing dates back to at least 1997 [8]. However, to our best knowledge, the adoption and promotion of cloud computing has been slow until 2007 [9].

We observe that the history of early industrial adoptions of cloud computing share some common milestones with that of service computing [4]. For example, it took service computing [27] a long time (ten years or so) to receive worldwide support from leading companies like IBM, Microsoft [25], BEA, and Oracle. Similarly, it has been many years since the early formalization effort [8] toward cloud computing. 

Besides, the wide adoption of a computing paradigm usually depends highly on the maturity of supporting technologies and industry recognitions. Service comput-ing has become much more popular since the success of Web services, although a Web service is only one of the technologies to fulfill the notion of service orientation [4]. Similarly, the distributed computing community has pointed out that many distributed computing techniques for cloud computing have been mature [7][10][11]. Many companies such as Dell and IBM have begun to ship cloud computing machines [5][10].

Last but not the least, in either service computing or cloud computing, research developments lag behind industrial adoptions. For instance, COSCON, a leading international container shipper, has a successful adoption of service computing. It successfully used service-oriented architecture to improve the business responsibility to customers in 2004 [3]. Yet, research studies in service-oriented architecture from the software engineering community [19] are still inadequate.

Despite our survey over the Internet, to our best knowledge, there are few articles to pinpoint researchissues in cloud computing. This would slow down the next research advances. We will alleviate this problem in the present paper.

In this paper, we use the classic computer architecture model [15] to provide a qualitative comparison framework to compare cloud computing with pervasive computing and service computing. The qualitative comparison framework includes three features: input-output (I/O), storage, and calculation. For each feature, we draw the comparison using multiple characteristics. Through such comparisons, we identify the connections between cloud computing and the other two computing paradigms from the perspective of software engineering. Based on the connections, we draw up a few research issues and discuss them in the paper to promote future exploration.

The main contribution of the paper is twofold: (i) To our best knowledge, we provide the first qualitative comparison on cloud computing, service computing, and pervasive computing. (ii) We present a series of research issues in cloud computing on top of the comparison framework. These issues promote future explorations.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the preliminaries of cloud computing, service computing, and pervasive computing. Section 3 intro-duces our qualitative framework to compare the above three computing paradigms and present our efforts to identify research issues in cloud computing. Finally, we review related work in Section 4 and draw a conclusion in Section 5.