CLOUD COMPUTING:MAKING HEADWAY WITH THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY - Computer Science Research and Technology - page 48

increase. In fact, there is an increasingly perceived vision that this computing service will one
day be the 5 th utility, after water, electricity, gas and telephony (Buyya et al, 2009).
C ONCLUSION
Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm which promises to provide
opportunities for delivering a variety of computing services in a way that has not been
experienced before. Until recently, HPC was considered not suitable for cloud computing due
to the performance overhead associated with virtualization which can impact on HPC's
requirement for tight integration between server nodes via low-latency interconnects.
However, these issues have been overcome by virtualization solutions that use new
hypervisors such as KVM and XEN. Furthermore, the economic, and indeed the green
credentials, of cloud computing have made this computing service an attractive and viable
option. To demonstrate the growing popularity of cloud computing for HPC a number of
examples were provided in this article of research organizations that decided to go the cloud
way.
Despite its growing popularity, there are still some concerns relating to cloud computing
such as security, outages and vendor-locking. Given the nascent nature of this technology,
this is not surprising. However, there are currently efforts being made to address some of
those issues. Furthermore, some organizations are more likely to cope with the consequences
of those concerns than others. This article has argued that, given the attractive attributes of
cloud computing with relation to 'economy' and 'efficiency', some organizations such as
small businesses, academic institutes and those involved in scientific research might find that
cloud computing's potential disadvantages are more likely to be outweighed by their current
advantages.
R EFERENCES
Argonne National Laboratory (2009a), ' DOE to explore scientific cloud computing at
Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories' , http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/
News/2009/news091014a.html (Accessed on: 24 January 2010).
Argonne National Laboratory (2009b), ' Nimbus and cloud computing meet STAR production
demands ', http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/ Nimbus-and-Cloud-Computing-Meet-
STAR-Production-Demands-42354742.html?viewAll=y (Accessed on: 5 April, 2010).
Bailey, D (2009), “ Does Azure have the allure to drive enterprises into the cloud ?”,
Computing , http://www.computing 2246131/azure-cure-enterprises-current (Accessed on:
14 March, 2010).
Brodkin, J (2010), 'NASA building cloud service for climate modeling', Computer World,
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9150381/
NASA_building_cloud_service_for_climate_modeling?source=rss_software (Accessed
on: 4 April, 2010).
Buyya, R., Yeo, C. S. and Venugopal, S. (2009), 'Market-Oriented Cloud Computing: Vision,
Hype, and Reality of Delivering IT Services as Computing Utilities', The 10 th IEEE