User:Ecocloud/sandbox



The EcoCloud research center at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, was founded by Babak Falsafi, a Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences to innovate future energy-efficient and environmentally friendly cloud technologies.

Cloud computing promises to bring ubiquitous information access with virtually-unbounded resources to all users at home, at work or on the move alike. EcoCloud is a consortium of university researchers to pioneer technologies to make cloud computing scalable, cost-effective and sustainable.

Cloud computing has emerged as a dominant computing platform providing billions of users world-wide with online services. The software applications powering these services, commonly referred to as scale-out workloads and which include web search, social networking and business analytics, tend to be characterized by massive working sets, high degrees of parallelism, and real-time constraints – features that set them apart from desktop, parallel and traditional commercial server applications. To support the growing popularity and continued expansion of cloud services, providers must overcome the physical space and power constraints that limit the growth of data centers.

To this end, EcoCloud addresses the fundamental research challenges of tomorrow's clouds along three thrusts:

Cloud data - A key challenge for today's cloud applications when querying data is response consistency and response time predictability. EcoCloud is developing technologies to improve trust in cloud data management by designing seamless, service-oriented query processing techniques that exploit the cloud platforms and infrastructure optimally. Current cloud data projects underway include: DB Toaster, Scientific DB and Staged DB.

Cloud energy - The computing servers forming the backbone of information technology have hit an energy wall with unsurmountable costs and environmental implications. EcoCloud is innovating vertically-integrated computing and cooling technologies to provide a holistic approach to energy management and minimization. Current cloud energy projects underway include: CMOSAIC, Energy Profiling, Energy-proportional Distributed Systems, Energy-proportional Networks, EuroCloud, PMSM, PRO3D and VISA.

Cloud intelligence - Clouds have been successfully used to scale data-parallel applications, but what about the truly "hard" problems, which cannot be easily parallelized and that are exponential in nature? EcoCloud is developing ways to solve such problems in the cloud, marking the next phase in transitioning critical applications from big, expensive monolithic computers to large clusters of commodity nodes. Current cloud intelligence projects underway include: Cloud9, ConfErr, ESD and Prophet.