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Expanding the Horizons of Cloud Computing Beyond the Data Centerz
-- Jon Weissman, University of Minnesota

Abstract:
The research challenges that we are addressing in our group. We are pursuing three areas that we believe will drive the evolution of the cloud and enable it to move beyond the current data center computing model. First, we describe how the power of edge resources can play an important role in the evolving cloud ecosystem to support in-situ data processing, locality-awareness, and privacy. We present a new cloud architecture called Nebula that is fully complementary and synergistic with the commercial cloud.

Second, the emergence of global services spanning multiple data-centers poses new challenges for efficient service execution and delivery. We describe our work with a global multi-data-center MapReduce/Hadoop service that we are building. One aspect of this work is to extend the rack-awareness of HDFS to data-center awareness. This work is a first-step towards general support for data-centric global cloud services.

Lastly, we describe our vision of a user-centric cloud in support of mobile hand-held devices that responds to user context, preferences, and device resource availability, to improve performance, reliability, and fidelity. Our user-centric cloud model can dynamically out-source data and computation to the cloud opportunistically. This work is also exploring implicit sharing patterns across mobile users in the cloud based on social ties and shared interests/preferences.

Preliminary results for running applications in real clouds for all three areas will be presented.

Bio:
Jon Weissman is a leading researcher in the area of high performance distributed computing. His involvement dates back to the influential Legion project at the University of Virginia during his Ph.D. He is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota where he leads the Distributed Computing Systems Group. His current research interests are in cloud computing, Grid computing, distributed systems, high performance computing, resource management, reliability, and e-science applications. He works primarily at the boundary between applications and systems. He received his B.S. degree from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia in 1989 and 1995, respectively, all in computer science. He is a senior member of the IEEE and awardee of the NSF CAREER Award (1995).