Grids and Clouds

Christian Baun
SCC FZK / KIT

During the last years with the support of public funding, grid computing
evolved from a computer scientists' field of research to a common working
environment for scientific disciplines like physics, medicine and meteorology.
Cloud computing realizes the advantages and overcomes the restrictions of the
grid computing paradigm. Elastic infrastructures can easily be created and
managed by cloud users.

Cloud computing will fundamentally change the character of the IT. Funds spent
in the past for keeping the IT resources running can be used in the future for
various tasks. The users have the freedom of choice to use the operating
systems, programming languages, frameworks, infrastructures and tools they
want.

Although commercial cloud offerings are proprietary, OpenSource solutions exist
in the field of IaaS with Eucalyptus and PaaS with AppScale. These solutions
establish the option to build private cloud infrastructures that are compatible
with the perhaps most popular cloud offerings in the market.

In order to accelerate the research on data center management and cloud services
the OpenCirrus Research Testbed has been started in July 2008 by HP, Intel, 
Yahoo!, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the Singapore
Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology 
(KIT). OpenCirrus aims to build an open, internet-scale global testbed for cloud
computing research focussing on data center management, cloud services, systems
and application level research.