Tony Hey – Cloud Computing

Rationale for Cloud computing

• Outsourcing IT infrastructure
• Minimize costs
• Large cloud/utility computing provides can have relativel very small ownership and operation costs due to the huge scale of deployment and automation
• Small business have access to large scale resources

Example – Amazon Web Services
= Simple Storage Service (s3) – storage for the internet; simple web service interface

Example – smugmug.com
= Profitable, debt-free company because it does not have any hardware resources; it only uses Amazon hardware (for free, in the cloud)

Examples from Microsoft:

Live Mesh

• A PC in the cloud
• Can synchronize PC in the cloud with your laptop, your mobile devices such as phones or music players etc

Office Live Workspace

• Can upload documents for other people to work on
• Other people can download and use those documents that you choose to share

The future = software plus services for science

Expect scientific research environments to follow similar trends to the commercial sector

Example – Trident Scientific Workflow Workbench

Toward a Smart Cyberinfrastructure

Collective intelligence

Example – last fm.

A world where all data is linked…
…and stored/processed/analyzed in the cloud