5 cool cloud computing research projects

Next week's HotCloud conference on cloud computing in San Diego will boast a slew of fresh research into this hottest of IT topics. Here's a glimpse at the work to be showcased at the event (PDFs of some research papers will not be available until the week of June 15 at the HotCloud site):

*Nebulas

Researchers from the University of Minnesota have outlined a way to use "distributed voluntary resources -- those donated by end-user hosts -- to form nebulas" that would potentially complement today's managed clouds from companies such as Amazon, IBM and Google. Nebulas could address the needs of service classes that more traditional clouds could not, providing more scalability, more geographical dispersion of nodes and lower cost, the researchers say. Possible users would include those rolling out experimental cloud services and those looking to offer free public services or applications.

Unlike famed volunteer-based computing resources such as SETI@home (now BOINC), nebulas would need to support more complex tasks. Challenges needing to be addressed would include managing highly distributed data and computational resources and coping with failures. "We believe that nebulas can exist as complementary infrastructures to clouds, and can even serve as a transition pathway for many services that would eventually be hosted on clouds," the researchers write in a paper titled "Nebulas: Using Distributed Voluntary Resources to Build Clouds."

(University of Minnesota researchers have a separate project dubbed "Virtual Putty" that sounds intriguing as well. It focuses on the reshaping of virtual machine footprints to satisfy user needs and ease VM management for resource providers.)

* CloudViews

Amidst the hype surrounding cloud computing, security issues are often raised, such as those involved with multiple customers having their data and applications sharing the same cloud resources. But researchers at the University of Washington also see lots of opportunity in the fact that Web services and applications will be so closely situated. CloudViews is a Hadoop HBase-supported common storage system being developed by the researchers "to facilitate collaboration through protected inter-service data sharing." The researchers say in a paper called "CloudViews: Communal Data Sharing in Public Clouds" that public cloud providers must facilitate such collaboration -- in the form of data driven, server side mashups -- to ensure the market's growth through development of new Web services.

* Trusted Cloud Computing Platform

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems have outlined a Trusted Cloud Computing Platform that "enables Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon EC2 to provide a closed box execution environment that guarantees confidential execution of guest virtual machines." Such a platform would assure customers that service providers haven't been messing with their data and would enable service providers to secure data even across many VMs. The researchers, in a paper titled "Towards Trusted Cloud Computing," acknowledge that details of how cloud providers set up their data centers is held pretty close to the vest, but base their system on an open source offering called Eucalyptus that they suspect is similar to at least some commercial implementations. A prototype based on the design is this research team's next step.