Cloud computing comes of age
In the era of digital information, cloud computing has positioned itself as a key platform for business and scientific computing. Based on the concepts of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS), it has made its way into several new services for end users. Against this backdrop, the EU-funded AIS-DC (Application Information Services for Distributed Computing Environments) project has developed a cloud manager that manages computer clusters on a cloud infrastructure through a web browser. Dubbed CloudMan, the system was tested and used at several research centres and universities, blossoming into a solid platform that has become well known in academic circles. It even became the standard for conducting bioinformatics data analysis on the cloud. The success of the application has led to three new grant proposals, the first of which represented a project called 'Easy and extensible cloud manager' to enhance the concept's potential. The second proposal and project, titled 'Smart scientific cloud computing', revolves around a solution for energy-efficient job distribution spanning several cloud resource providers. The third, in the medical field, involves MapReduce-type workloads to help develop new bioinformatics tools over distributed architectures. Two more proposals were also introduced under AIS-DC in the fields of blue biotechnology and multimedia, demonstrating the true potential and versatility of CloudMan. Moreover, the project team explored several other promising applications in bioinformatics. The variety of different applications has led to many publications on the topic, appearing in various journals. AIS-DC has contributed to increasing socio-economic impact in conducting research and business, particularly for SMEs, as well as for service and cloud providers. What’s more, the project’s results promise to strengthen applications in cloud computing and help position Europe as a leader in the field.
Keywords
Cloud computing, cloud manager, bioinformatics, biotechnology, multimedia
