Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm that has the potential to radically change the way information technology is used and provided. It is the conglomeration of the applications delivered as services over the Internet on-demand, and the hardware/software in the data centres providing these services. Cloud computing is having a profound impact as to how we perceive Internet: the hardware and software is becoming a utility and users are charged according to the usage of resources and services. The Cloud computing gives the illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand, the Cloud users pay for use of computing resources per CPU hour and per storage amount.
Significant amount of hardware resources and software services will be provided by the data centres. Examples of such services are: Google’s online word processing and spreadsheet (Google Apps), Amazon’s web services (EC2), virtualized desktop accessed using web browser, and Nokia’s Mobile Cloud services, for online gaming, 2D/3D maps, online music/video. The servers in data centres will need to address the needs of potentially billions of thin clients operated by users of handheld mobile devices – these users represent the target market segment for using the technology to be delivered in this project. In fact, it has been estimated that about 800 millions mobile users will have “Cloud compatible” (i.e. 3G wireless capability) subscription in 2012. Each cloud user usually will only need a small fraction of the Cloud resources. This is distinct from high performance computing, where typically few or even one user can exhaust all available computing resources toward one problem.
Cloud computing is already happening. Several companies, such as Amazon and Google, are leading the way to Cloud computing by using very large numbers of commodity x86 architecture based PC boards as servers in data centres, running a free operating system such as Linux, and designing management software that parcels out the work and manages around hot and failed units.
