National Science Foundation Awards $20 Million For Cloud Computing Experiments 25
aarondubrow writes The National Science Foundation today announced two $10 million projects to create cloud computing testbeds — to be called "Chameleon" and "CloudLab" — that will enable the academic research community to experiment with novel cloud architectures and pursue new, architecturally-enabled applications of cloud computing. While most of the original concepts for cloud computing came from the academic research community, as clouds grew in popularity, industry drove much of the design of their architecture. Today's awards complement industry's efforts and enable academic researchers to advance cloud computing architectures that can support a new generation of innovative applications, including real-time and safety-critical applications like those used in medical devices, power grids, and transportation systems.
What do they mean by cloud? (Score:3)
Whenever these kinds of stories come up I really wonder what they mean by "cloud computing"
do they mean "virtualized computing" like the virtual compute stuff on Amazon EC2/Microsoft Azure/Google Cloud ?
or do they mean "Cloud" in the sense that people refer to Dropbox as 'the cloud' or any other server storage/service thing?
Certainly if they are referring to the latter.. this kind of spending is mostly a waste, we know how to make server farms at datacenters...
if it's the former, what good is a mere 10million going to do when the big names in the industry, microsoft,google,amazon, ibm ..and others... are spending way more researhing and developing it?
Re:What do they mean by cloud? (Score:4)
Why do people think "virtualized computing" is cloud ? It isn't. Because a VMWare cluster isn't cloud.
Cloud has characteristics like:
- pay per use
- API to control it, so it can be automated
- a failure model, like availability zones. So you know that things are 100 % seperated so if one AZ goes down an other AZ does not depend on it.
- etc.
Nobody says it has to be virtual either, you can get physical machines from Rackspace or Softlayer.
Re:What do they mean by cloud? (Score:4, Funny)
Cloud has characteristics like:
-Consists of vapour (not necessarely water)
-Is a silver bullet (any IT-problem)
-Strong SEP field (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem#Fiction)
-Drawn in powerpoints as a fluffy, obscure image resembling a cloud (hence the name)
Re: (Score:2)
IBM advertises cloud computing. Why would they care if I know about their cloud? At the same time IBM is a sponsor of World Community Grid. WCG is the opposite of cloud computing as it is distributed computing. IBM ask for volunteers to give them access to their computers to solve a given problem. I think this is wrong since the total cost of all the volunteers to do the computing is more than IBM would spend to do the same amount of computing. I know that the cost per billion flops for a super comput
Re: (Score:1)
So a mobile phone network is cloud service and it's been around since the 90s.
It's such a stupid name.
Re: (Score:2)
You still, get to keep some of your data on your cellphone memory. True cloud computing is where you can get blackmailed for access to your data, plus government snooping is automated, with common sense network traffic monitoring therefore inspection at each access instance to your data by you, as opposed to the feds raiding your house to look at your hard drives, which in the old days required a warrant, so you could keep accessing your own data for free, without having to pay ransom for it constantly. For
Re: (Score:1)
There's an extension for Chrome that will translate all of this confusing "cloud" nonsense for all of us into something clear and accurate: https://chrome.google.com/webs... [google.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Cloud computing refers to the practice of using a network of remote servers to store, manage and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.
Re: (Score:1)
My calculations went into the cloud and I can't get them back! Nobody understands the cloud! (sorry, trailer channeling)
Re:What do they mean by cloud? (Score:4, Interesting)
Whenever these kinds of stories come up I really wonder what they mean by "cloud computing"
Cloud computing got popular when thin client got boring. These marketing generalizations always drive me crazy. If you have an on-line storage or backup service, just call it that. If it is on-line music streaming service, web based office tools, whatever just call it what it is. Otherwise, you just piss off those that get it and confuse those that don't.
Re: (Score:1)
You're right, "cloud computing" is a hopelessly vague term, and the headline by itself does very little to describe what these projects are. In the standard set of buzzwords, "infrastructure as a service" probably comes closest.
But read the first link text carefully -- these are "projects to create cloud computing testbeds". Not creating clouds; creating testbeds in which cloud experiments can be conducted. The users of these testbeds are NOT users of a "cloud"; the users of these testbeds bring up their
We sure could use the rain (Score:1)
but how effective is cloud seeding anyway? We used to call these things rain dances... with indian in front but P.C. nowadaysdonchano.
Re: (Score:3)
They have a solution... (Score:1)
So they decided cloud computing is the solution... Now they want to fund someone to define a problem for it to solve...
More like a fog ... (Score:2)
... or, more accurately, smog.
The systems the cloud is running on has been compromised and is available to exploits out the wazoo. Let's patch that first.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know about it.
I like this:
"One way to address this [an expanded cloud] is through Fog Computing. This is a paradigm where cloud computing is extended to the edge of the network. This creates a highly virtualized platform that provides compute, storage, and networking services between end devices and traditional cloud computing data centers."
Maybe in the next iteration, it will include synergy.
The term is Grid Computing (Score:3)
Cloud this cloud that... I'm sick of clouds.
If IAU gets to redefine popular language to align with scientific language having specific and unambiguous meaning why can't "Cloud" banner be wrestled out the clutches of marketeers?
Everything is networked running off some datacenter somewhere... saying "the cloud" is like saying "the thing" .. you might as well say nothing at all as this conveys about the same amount of useful information.
Please I implore you all to stop being a bunch of sissy care bears enough with "cloud". Let the meme die already.