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

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