Editorial
Special section: Recent advances in utility and cloud computing

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Introduction

Welcome to the special issue of Future Generation Computer System (FGCS) Journal in Utility and Cloud Computing. This special issue compiles a number of excellent technical contributions that significantly advance the state-of-the-art in utility and cloud computing comprising selected and extended contributions from the UCC 2010, the 2010 International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing, held in Chennai, India, in December 2010. Papers selected for UCC 2010 were peer-reviewed by 2–3 reviewers. Authors have improved their papers based on conference reviews and presented them at UCC 2010 in India. Based on the feedback authors received at the conference, they have further extended their papers and submitted them to FGCS. All papers submitted to FGCS are further reviewed to meet its high standard expectation. Authors were requested to revise their papers to address comments from FGCS reviewers and to resubmit them. These revised papers were finally accepted by the Editor-In-Chief of FGCS for publication in this special issue.

Selected papers reflect the current trends and challenges in establishing reliable, self-adaptable, and economy-driven Clouds and Utility computing infrastructure, platforms, and applications. It is important to note that even the most sophisticated Cloud infrastructure can fail to reach the critical consumer mass, if the market mechanisms do not support the needs of the market participants. Thus, the first trend considers establishment of Cloud markets and generation of Service Level Agreements between Cloud market participants. Mega scale and heterogeneous Cloud infrastructure needs reliable Cloud resource management considering large data transfers, advance resource reservation and sophisticated autonomic management of resources representing the second trend we report in this special issue. On the one hand, Cloud computing has a huge potential to revolutionize IT infrastructure by providing novel business models. On the other hand, due to virtualization overheads and mega-scale infrastructure there is potential for energy waste. The third trend we focus on in this special issue is (energy) efficient usage of resources & solutions for green Clouds. The fourth topic we cover in this special issue deals with Cloud programming models and application of traditional Cloud programming models (e.g., MapReduce) to various application areas, e.g., scientific computing. We will discuss how papers, selected for this special issue, address these four key topics.

Section snippets

Emerging topics

  • (1)

    Cloud markets/SLA management. Maurer et al. presents a novel approach for the management of liquidity in Cloud markets by introducing the SLA mappings where users can express their difference to the public SLA templates used by market instruments. By applying the SLA mapping approach the user’s utility to find an appropriate match in the market is increased, the balance between utility gain and costs for performing mappings are in a reasonable balance—thus, increasing the market liquidity. Ralf

Acknowledgments

It is important to note that UCC 2010 did not publish pre-conference proceedings. All high quality papers selected for the UCC after peer review are revised and presented at the conference. Authors have further extended their papers based on feedback they received at the conference and submitted to FGCS Journal. These extended papers went to through further review via the FGCS review management system and have undergone further revision prior to their acceptance for this special issue, which

Dr. Ivona Brandic is Assistant Professor at the Distributed Systems Group, Information Systems Institute, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). Prior to that, she was Assistant Professor at the Department of Scientific Computing, Vienna University. She received her PhD degree from Vienna University of Technology in 2007. From 2003 to 2007 she participated in the special research project AURORA (Advanced Models, Applications and Software Systems for High Performance Computing) and the

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Dr. Ivona Brandic is Assistant Professor at the Distributed Systems Group, Information Systems Institute, Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). Prior to that, she was Assistant Professor at the Department of Scientific Computing, Vienna University. She received her PhD degree from Vienna University of Technology in 2007. From 2003 to 2007 she participated in the special research project AURORA (Advanced Models, Applications and Software Systems for High Performance Computing) and the European Union’s GEMSS (Grid-Enabled Medical Simulation Services) project. She is involved in the European Union’s SCube project and she is leading the Austrian national FoSII (Foundations of Self-governing ICT Infrastructures) project funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). She is a Management Committee member of the European Commission’s COST Action on Energy Efficient Large Scale Distributed Systems. From June–August 2008 she was visiting researcher at the University of Melbourne. Her interests comprise SLA and QoS management, Service-oriented architectures, autonomic computing, workflow management, and large-scale distributed systems (Cloud, Grid, Cluster, etc.).

Dr. Rajkumar Buyya is Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering; and Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also serving as the founding CEO of Manjrasoft., a spin-off company of the University, commercializing its innovations in Cloud Computing. He has authored 350 publications and four text books. He has also edited several books including “Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms” recently published by Wiley Press, USA. He is one of the highly cited authors in computer science and software engineering worldwide (h-index=53,g-index=115,15500+citations).

Software technologies for Grid and Cloud computing developed under Dr. Buyya’s leadership have gained rapid acceptance and are in use at several academic institutions and commercial enterprises in 40 countries around the world. Dr. Buyya has led the establishment and development of key community activities, including serving as foundation Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing and five IEEE/ACM conferences. These contributions and the international research leadership of Dr. Buyya are recognized through the award of the “2009 IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing” from the IEEE Computer Society, USA. Manjrasoft’s Aneka Cloud technology developed under his leadership has received the “2010 Asia Pacific Frost & Sullivan New Product Innovation Award”.

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