Crossroads - Spring 2010

PlanetLab’s focus on wide-area networks is suboptimal for cloud platform research, unfortunately, and the same holds true for other similar resources. A handful of test beds appropriate for cloud research have made their debut recently, including Open Cirrus from HP, Intel and Yahoo!, and the Open Cloud Testbed. We encourage other players to participate and contribute resources to cloud research, with the goal of providing a standard test bed with open-access, at least for academia, including researchers from underrepresented universities. Who will create the future “CloudLab”?

How to Get Involved

Students and researchers who are interested in shaping cloud computing should consider participating in the LADIS ( www.cs.cornell.edu/ projects/ladis2010) or HotCloud ( www.usenix.org/events/hotcloud10) workshops, or the upcoming Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/events/socc2010). Large industry players are currently driving the research bandwagon for cloud computing, but the journey is only beginning. A concerted multi-disciplinary effort is needed to turn the cloud computing promise into a success.

Biographies

Dr. Ymir Vigfusson is a postdoctoral researcher with the Distributed Middleware group at the IBM Research Haifa Labs. His research is focused around distributed systems, specifically, real-world problems that embody deep trade-offs. He holds a PhD from Cornell University.

Dr. Gregory Chockler is a research staff member in the Distributed Middleware group at the IBM Research Haifa Labs. His research interests span a wide range of topics in the area of large-scale distributed computing and cloud computing. He is one of the founders and organizers of the ACM/SIGOPS Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems and Middleware (LADIS). He holds a PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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