" The Role of Cloud Computing in Science and Enterprise–Issues, Problems and Solutions"

Eleni Karatza

Department of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Biography :

Eleni Karatza is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Dr. Karatza's research interests include Computer Systems Modeling and Simulation, Performance Evaluation, Grid and Cloud Computing, Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems, Resource Allocation and Scheduling and Real-time Distributed Systems.

Professor Karatza has authored or co-authored about 200 technical papers and book chapters including four papers that earned best paper awards at international conferences. She is senior member of IEEE, ACM and SCS, and she served as an elected member of the Board of Directors at Large of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (2009-2011). She has served as General Chair, Program Chair and Keynote Speaker in International Conferences.

Professor Karatza is the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier Journal "Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory", Area Editor of the "Journal of Systems and Software" of Elsevier, and she has been Guest Editor of Special Issues in multiple International Journals.

Abstract:

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm which offers computational services to scientists, consumers and enterprises as utilities, on a pay-per-use approach.

Because of the nature of these systems, there are important issues that must be addressed, such as: performance, resource allocation, efficient scheduling, energy conservation, reliability, protection of sensitive data, security and trust, cost, availability, quality. Furthermore, due to the cost of electrical power consumption and the environmental impact, energy efficiency in cloud systems is a global IT concern. Effective management of cloud resources is crucial to use effectively the power of these systems and achieve high system performance.

The cloud computing paradigm can offer various types of services, such as computational resources for complex applications, web services, social networking, urban mobility, health care, environmental science, etc. Resource allocation and scheduling is a difficult task in clouds where there are many alternative heterogeneous computers. The scheduling algorithms must seek a way to maintain a good response time to leasing cost ratio. Furthermore, adequate data security and availability are critical issues that have to be considered along with energy-efficient solutions that are required to minimize the impact of cloud computing on the environment.

Cloud Computing provides the possibility for collecting, storing and processing large amounts of data from different data sources. Recently, Big Data has become one of the most important research fields in science, engineering, enterprise, biology, healthcare, etc. Big data has the potential to impact every aspect of a business. However, in order that cloud computing will be a platform for supporting big data applications, appropriate algorithms are required for acquiring knowledge from a variety of big data, which are not centrally collected. Furthermore, as clouds become more secure, the use of data analytics in cloud computing is expected to continue to grow.

Recently, the enormous growth of cloud computing together with the advance in mobile technology have led to the new era of Mobile Cloud Computing. Efficient and reliable management of distributed resources in mobile clouds became more important as more and more users collaborate computationally over the Internet via powerful mobile devices. Furthermore, the simultaneous usage of services from different Clouds can have additional benefits such as lower cost and high availability.

In this talk we will present state-of-the-art research covering a variety of concepts on cloud computing, based on existing or simulated cloud systems, that provide insight into problems solving and we will provide future directions in the cloud computing area.