IEEE CloudCom 2010

The IEEE CloudCom 2010 was a fantastic event from multiple perspectives. First, it was a first class conference with a great mix of national and international attendance which offered relevant information on current cloud computing topics. The conference included a number of very helpful tutorials such as those offered on Hadoop, Open Nebula, Microsoft Azure, Twister, and others.
R2AD was proud to have been accepted to present a poster on our recent cloud client which was sponsored by DISA and was developed using the OCCI and CDMI cloud specifications.
Our poster paper and poster PDF are also available from our web site.

The Future Grid work by Geoffrey Fox and his team is going to be interesting to follow and exciting to work with. Map Reduce was a popular topic of a number of the papers presented. Hadoop is one of many applications which can be used in cloud environments.

Ian Foster gave a great key note, in which he emphasized the need for additional infrastructure automation so that cloud users can focus on their main concerns. With this in mind, he introduced Globus Online with a data transfer service as an offering.
Microsoft's Krishna Kumar provided a great Azure tutorial which was echoed in Dennis Gannon's keynote address which emphasized their Truck based cloud data center and their practical tool integration to the cloud (i.e. Excel ribbon and Blast tool).
Standards were also discussed by a panel which included representatives from the Open Grid Forum (OGF), Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), and others.

It will be interesting to explore many of the topics discussed during the conference...such as using a cloud for geospatial processing of data which is updated often. R2AD will explore this and other areas in support of our customers and mobile computing development efforts.

Visit the IEEE CloudCom 2010 site for complete coverage, including a full gallery of images and video.

R2AD presents at Storage Developers Conference 2010

West Coast VP David Moolenaar and CTO Michael Behrens presented at the SDC-2010 event in September 2010. The presentation focused on the recent experience in developing the R2AD Cloud Client. Approximately 300 developers in the storage community attended the conference. One of the main tracks was on cloud computing and how the new CDMI specification from SNIA can be used by developers. Visit the R2AD cloud page for more details.

Virtual Computing Considerations

When developing VMs a while back, these were documented as Michael's Laws of Virtual Computing - however they are really just some observations which help demystify the subject, enjoy...

1. Whether you have 1000 virtual computers or 1000 physical computers, you still have 1000 computers.
   
2. Software bugs exhibited in physical machines are also exhibited in virtual machines.
   
3. Applications which run slowly on physical computers are still slow in virtual computers.
   
4. Hardware failures affect virtual computers too.
   
5. Applications that consume bandwidth, memory, CPU, and disk space will continue to use resources when virtualized.
   
6. Software license fees still apply when running applications in virtual environments.
   

A new West Coast office in San Diego, CA is now open for business. R2AD is proud to introduce our new VP of West Cost Operations, David Moolenaar! David is currently focusing on our cloud computing client which shall be demonstrated at the next Open Grid Forum in Chicago.


R2AD is developing a JavaFX based cloud client for the OGF/SNAI demo which shall be presented at OGF 29 and possibly at SDC 2010. The client implements the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) and the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI).