National Science Foundation Awards $20 Million For Cloud Computing Experiments

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.

Comments

What do they mean by cloud?

[lemur3]

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?

[Lennie]

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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:What do they mean by cloud?

[Mr D from 63]

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:What do they mean by cloud?

[sillybilly]

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 now you don't get blackmailed over your cloud stored data, because there are many legal, offline competitor alternatives. Alternatives which have to be eliminated by those pent up on blackmailing you for some good ransom money in the future. It's so hard to make money on software, by trying to sell you an operating system as a subscription service with daily security patches that patch the patches that patch the patches.. it's a joke, so a business model where the operating system is free, but you hand over the data and pay each time you access it, sounds like a much more workable one, to those whose daily bread comes from computer software related things..Why work hard to make new software when the old stuff was much better, when you can just sit back and get fat collecting over cloud data storage ransom fees? Of course there is a fair price, in that they do have to provide the cloud infrastructure, they buy the harddrives and you get to rent them, as opposed to having your own, and there is sometimes a fair rent price, but in the free market the usual question is not what a fair, economic benefit and accordingly price such a service should carry, but instead, what is the price the market is willing to bear under blackmailing situations? Only the commies would ever dream of calculating fair prices, and assigning them to everything in the economy, as in absolute 100% price control on everything, instead of letting the free market manage it, and as their case proved, instead of economic efficiency and fairness and justice, all they created were empty stores and people standing in line at the stores, because the prices were so cheap, and miscalculated, that every time it arrived at the store it fully sold out. In a blackmail prone situation, as in, if you're a city dweller, you have to stand in line for bread, no matter what the price of bread, you're getting blackmailed. Usually in the commie era it was the self reliant independently able to exist without a job or even a government villages, where free independent growing of food still went on anyway, and they were the ones who constantly kept the city dwellers decently fed. The only issue a village has is military security, for which it needs a city like contraption, or at the very least a monastery like scientific advancement zone, to where the villagers provide the excess production to sustain these "parasites" who can defend them against an invasion

Re:We sure could use the rain

[Mr D from 63]

Here is a real world example of cloud computing; http://www.csgnetwork.com/estc...

The term is Grid Computing

[WaffleMonster]

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.