SIMUTools2012

Abstract: Cloud computing is the IT area with the highest growth in these days. It offers computing and storage services according to the public utilities model (such as energy and gas) and provides high value services, traditionally very expensive, at much lower costs - between 1/7 to 1/5, depending on the adopted pay per use model. In order to have such paradigm widely diffused, the provider of Cloud services has to develop adequate software solutions to:

• manage virtualized resources
• interoperate and federate clouds
• adopt pay per use models
• ensure dynamic access to available resources, ensuring fault tolerance, availability and reliability
• provide service level agreement management and QoS monitoring and prediction mechanisms
• provide adequate security, trustiness and privacy guarantees

The cloud computing market promises to quickly grow in the next years, thanks to the advantages it offers both at the provider and the client levels. Big players are very interested in cloud computing, such as Amazon and Google. In 2011 more than 80% of new software products was distributed according to cloud infrastructures and by 2014 roughly 1/3 of all new "business software" will adopt cloud. This has determined an overall market of about 19 billions of dollars in 2011 and new opportunities for developing cloud computing services will rise in the next 3 years for about 160 billions of dollars. Cloud computing also carries several open issues to be promptly addressed: services reliability, security and privacy, QoS guarantees are perceived as fundamental features to be addressed. Deeply understanding such problems, and the interests the clients devote to such issues, is one of the crucial aspects that will characterize the market in the coming years, as a wider adoption of such services will determine a greater awareness of inherent problems and limits. Cloud computing is quickly modifying the IT market, creating new business opportunities and paving the way towards innovation. In the following 5 years analysts foresee that investments in cloud based services will grow three times, if compared with the current ones (reaching 9% of the whole IT market). What is really surprising is that Cloud computing will represent the 25% of IT investments in 2012 and about 34% in 2013. Cloud-based services are entering a growing trend that experts believe will not be touched by current financial crisis. This tutorial introduces the main principles of cloud computing, highlighting innovation and problems to be addressed. Keeping an eye to business opportunities, technological aspects will be discussed together with concepts related to services reliability and performance. The Clever middleware will be presented, concepts of volunteer contribution (Cloud@Home) will be introduced and some modeling issues will be discussed to rise the attention towards the new challenges related to the adoption of the cloud computing paradigm.

Bio: Antonio Puliafito is a full professor of computer engineering at the University of Messina, Italy. His interests include parallel and distributed systems, networking, wireless, GRID and Cloud computing. During 1994-1995 he spent 12 months as visiting professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of Duke University, North Carolina - USA, where he was involved in research on advanced analytical modelling techniques. He is the coordinator of the Ph.D. course in Advanced Technologies for Information Engineering currently available at the University of Messina and the responsible for the course of study in computers engineering. He was a referee for the European Community for the projects of the fourth, fifth and sixth Framework Program and he is currently acting as a referee also in the seventh FP. He has contributed to the development of the software tools WebSPN and ArgoPerformance, which are being used both at national and international level. Dr. Puliafito is co-author (with R. Sahner and Kishor S. Trivedi) of the text entitled "Performance and Reliability Analysis of Computer Systems: An Example-Based Approach Using the SHARPE Software Package", edited by Kluwer Academic Publishers. He is currently the director of the RFIDLab, a joint research lab with Oracle and Intel on RFID and wireless. He acted as the director of the Centre on Information Technologies Development and Their Applications (CIA) till 2009. From 2006 to 2008 he acted as the technical director of the Project 901, aiming at creating a wireless/wired communication infrastructure inside the University of Messina to support new value added services (winner of the CISCO innovation award). He is also the responsible for the University of Messina of two big Grid Projects (TriGrid VL, http://www.trigrid.it, and PI2S2, http://www.pi2s2.it) funded by the Sicilian Regional Government and by the Ministry of University and Research, respectively. He is currently a member of the general assembly and of the technical committee of the Reservoir and Vision, IP projects funded from the European Commission under the seventh FP to explore the deployment and management of IT services and data across different administrative domains, IT platforms and geographies. He is also the main investigator of the Italian PRIN2008 research project “Cloud@Home”, trying to combine cloud and volunteer computing. He is the scientific director of Inquadro s.r.l., a spin-off company of the University of Messina whose main business is RFID and its application both in public and private sectors.