On December 5th, Professor Manish Parashar gave the keynote speech at the 4th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2011) in Melbourne Australia.

The International Conference on Utility Computing and Cloud Computing is dedicated to sharing recent R&D advances in cloud and utility computing. Computing is being transformed to a model consisting of services that are commoditized and delivered in a manner similar to traditional utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services based on their requirements without regard to where the services are hosted or how they are delivered. Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility computing vision and Cloud computing is the most recent kid in the block, which is on its way to make the vision of “computing utilities” a reality.

The title of Professor Parashar's keynote speech was "Moving Beyond IT Outsourcing -- Can Clouds Transform Science?". Dr. Parashar's speech was very well received and he has been invited in January to give another talk to the Australian Computer Society.

Here is the abstract of Professor Parashar's speech:

Abstract

Cloud computing has emerged as a dominant paradigm that has been widely adopted by enterprises. Clouds provide on-demand access to computing utilities, an abstraction of unlimited computing resources, and support for on-demand scale up, scale down and scale out. Clouds are also rapidly joining high-performance computing system, clusters and Grids as viable platforms for scientific exploration and discovery. As a result, understanding application formulations and usage modes that are meaningful in such a hybrid infrastructure, and how application workflows can effectively utilize it, is critical. In this talk, I will l explore the role of clouds in science and engineering. I will also explore how science and engineering applications can benefit from clouds and how the cloud abstraction can lead to new paradigms and practices. This talk is based on research that is part of the CometCloud autonomic cloud-computing project at the Center for Autonomic Computing at Rutgers.