Looking for a schematic of cloud computing

mmmna · . . . . Joined: 21 Apr 2025 Posts: 7224

Pretty much what the title declares: I'm looking for a schematic of 'cloud computing'.
Things like: where are the applications launched from, what environments are expected in the device I possess, where is the application being executed ("in the cloud" is what I hear being spoken, but where is the CPU that is performing the instructions is what I would like to know). It sounds like I'm clueless, right? Really, though, there are so many vague references discussed in places that I visit, I have no information.

VHockey86 · Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2025 1:24 am Post subject:

The field is huge and the term "cloud computing" gets loosely thrown around to mean a whole lot of different things. Utility Computing, Metacomputing, Grid computing, Cloud computing - all fundamentally the same idea, but the name has changed every decade or so (it sounds dumb, but researchers need to call it something new/different in order to renew their NSF grants). Lately you'll find a lot of people making a distinction between cloud and grid computing with the use of virtual machines. Where compute resources in a grid are more defined, with virtual machines, your "machine" can "float around" the grid and you don't necessarily (from an application point of view) know where it is - it's analogous to the electron cloud model of the atom in physics I guess.

Ian Foster has been at the forefront of Grid/Cloud Computing in the academic community and done quite a lot of survey research.

I recommend these articles
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~itf/Articles/WhatIsTheGrid.pdf
www.globus.org/alliance/publications/papers/anatomy.pdf

You'll find that what the scientific and academic communties mean by cloud/grid computing tends to differ from what companies like Sun and Amazon like to throw around - "cloud computing" has become somewhat of a marketing buzzword perpetuated by Google, Sun, IBM, Amazon.

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mmmna · . . . . Joined: 21 Apr 2025 Posts: 7224

Ahh, collegiate level references!

So the cloud tends to refer to dispersement...
-data served from 'anywhere in plural' by appointment and under certain restrictions;
-processors (plural) available anywhere by appointment and under certain restrictions;
-destination (usually one person wants the results) can be anywhere (usually in singular).

Close?

VHockey86 · Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2025 3:15 am Post subject:

- End user has some computing need
- Ideally there's some portal/interface/workflow software for the user to define his problem (usually a program and a bunch of data sets, or it could be an existing service on the server)
- Job is submitted to a cloud of resources, the resources may be a condor cluster of workstations, a bluegene supercomputer, commodity clusters, data warehouses, etc. The idea is for the resources to be abstract as opposed to having to code for a specific architecture / network topology / etc - this is where virtual machines are becoming popular for HPC since the same program can run on intel / ibm / cray hardware under the hood but the user doesn't need to have any clue.
- Job results are collected and returned to the user.

When you do google search or access google docs or gmail you're accessing their own private cloud via web services (search, email, document servers, etc).

At the end of the day it boils down to a basic client-server paradigm, except your server can be a set of massive distributed computing resource.

_________________
Main Desktops : Kubuntu 10.4. ArchLinux 64-bit. Windows7 64-bit. Windows XP 32-bit.

MacBook: OS X Snow Leopard (10.6)

mmmna · . . . . Joined: 21 Apr 2025 Posts: 7224

Ahh. The last 2 posts are correct, then?

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VHockey86 · Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2025 9:24 pm Post subject:

yeah, they're all valid points

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Main Desktops : Kubuntu 10.4. ArchLinux 64-bit. Windows7 64-bit. Windows XP 32-bit.

MacBook: OS X Snow Leopard (10.6)

mmmna · . . . . Joined: 21 Apr 2025 Posts: 7224

Coolness.

Thanks, very much, for your assistance!

_________________
-Kubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta2 on Celeron D desktop
-PCLinuxOS 2025 LXDE on EeePC 900A with Atom n270 (modded with 32G SATA drive and 2G ram).

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