[CAnet - news] Cloud computing is the way forward rather than the Grid

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 [Savas Parastatidis is part of Tony Hey's Technical Computing team at
Microsoft. He recently gave and excellent presentation at SC07 called "The
Web as the Platform for Research" at the Grid Computing Environments (GCE)
workshop.

I completely agree with his assertion that "Cloud computing is the way
forward rather than the Grid. Organizations are not going to be sharing
resources [where] you can definitely get resources cheaper from the cloud
rather than having to maintain, and then share them with others. "

The Amazon Ec2/S3 services are a good example of this trend towards cloud
computing and I expect soon many other large organizations like IBM,
Microsoft and Google will be offering cloud services as well.

As I mentioned in previous postings the cost of using cloud services is
often cheaper than the cost of power and cooling a typical cluster at a
university, never mind the overhead and operational costs of such a
facility.

As well many small commercial organizations are establishing a variety of
free web services and tool for the research and education community using
cloud services like Amazon. They make money whenever a third party
researcher uses these free services on the compute cloud - sort of a
sophisticated "click advertising" revenue model.  This also frees up the
researcher from worrying about the complexity and politics of using a grid
or local HPC resource and can instead focus on their core competency of
their research field. - BSA]

http://savas.parastatidis.name/2007/11/12/919a1978-9c1f-4b7b-8824-009363863b
8e.aspx


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