By Cloud Computing SpunjePublished: December 7, 2009Posted in: Business Apps, Business Intelligence, Cloud Services, Clouds, Opinions & Explanations, VirtualizationTags: 
Cloud computing is an infrastructure paradigm that moves computation to the Web in the form of a Web-based service. The idea is simplicity itself — institutions contract with Internet vendors for computational resources instead of providing those resources themselves through the purchase and maintenance of computational clusters and supercomputer hardware. As expected with any computational platform — especially one utilized for high performance and scientific computing — performance limitations within the platform define which computational problems will run well on that platform. So, the question becomes, “Is cloud computing a useful computational platform for the computational problems you and your institution need to address?”
It is important to note that cloud computing is considered distinct from grid or utility computing. With cloud computing, the user effectively rents time on virtual machines to run their own applications — they do not own any computing resources and may not use any service provider applications. Through the use of pre-configured virtual machines, scientists avoid any of the technical issues associated with getting an application to run — they just use it. This helps to avoid the pointed joke that defines a computer as, “a device that turns excellent scientists into mediocre programmers and systems administrators
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/articles-HPC-Cloud-Computing-Pie-in-the-sky-120109.aspx
Infrastructure offers potentially big changes
Cloud computing is an infrastructure paradigm that moves computation to the Web in the form of a Web-based service. The idea is simplicity itself — institutions contract with Internet vendors for computational resources instead of providing those resources themselves through the purchase and maintenance of computational clusters and supercomputer hardware. As expected with any computational platform — especially one utilized for high performance and scientific computing — performance limitations within the platform define which computational problems will run well on that platform. So, the question becomes, “Is cloud computing a useful computational platform for the computational problems you and your institution need to address?”
It is important to note that cloud computing is considered distinct from grid or utility computing. With cloud computing, the user effectively rents time on virtual machines to run their own applications — they do not own any computing resources and may not use any service provider applications. Through the use of pre-configured virtual machines, scientists avoid any of the technical issues associated with getting an application to run — they just use it. This helps to avoid the pointed joke that defines a computer as, “a device that turns excellent scientists into mediocre programmers and systems administrators
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/articles-HPC-Cloud-Computing-Pie-in-the-sky-120109.aspx
Infrastructure offers potentially big changes
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