Gradually tails off asymptotically cloudhome can

gradually “tails off” asymptotically, [email protected] can catch the Long Tail effect
[ 1 ], providing similar or higher computing capabilities than commercial providers’
data centers, by grouping small computing resources from many single contributors.
In the following, we demonstrate how it is possible to realize all these aims
through the [email protected] paradigm. In Section 2, we describe the functional
architecture of the [email protected] infrastructure, and in Section 3, we characterize
the blocks implementing the functions previously identified into the [email protected]
core structure. Section 4 concludes the chapter by recapitulating our work and
discussing challenges and future work.
6.2 [email protected] Overview
The idea behind [email protected] is to reuse “domestic” computing resources to build
voluntary contributors’ Clouds that are interoperable and, moreover, interoperate
with other foreign, and also commercial, Cloud infrastructures. With [email protected],

97 6 Open and Interoperable Clouds: The [email protected] Way
anyone can experience the power of Cloud computing, both actively by providing
his/her own resources and services, and passively by submitting his/her applications
and requirements.
6.2.1 Issues, Challenges, and Open Problems
Ian Foster summarizes the computing paradigm of the future as follows [ 9 ]: “... we
will need to support on-demand provisioning and configuration of integrated ‘virtual
systems’ providing the precise capabilities needed by an end user. We will need to
define protocols that allow users and service providers to discover and hand off
demands to other providers, to monitor and manage their reservations, and arrange
payment. We will need tools for managing both the underlying resources and the
resulting distributed computations. We will need the centralized scale of today’s Cloud
utilities, and the distribution and interoperability of today’s Grid facilities .... ”
We share all these requirements, but in a slightly different way: we want to
actively involve users into such a new form of computing, allowing them to create
their own interoperable Clouds. In other words, we believe that it is possible to
export, apply, and adapt the “@home” philosophy to the Cloud-computing
paradigm. In this way, by merging Volunteer and Cloud computing, a new para-
digm can be created: [email protected] . This new computing paradigm gives back the
power and control to users, who can decide how to manage their resources/services
in a global, geographically distributed context. They can voluntarily sustain scien-
tific projects by freely placing their resources/services at the scientific research
centers’ disposal, or can earn money by selling their resources to Cloud-computing
providers in a pay-per-use/share context.
Therefore, in [email protected], both the commercial/business and volunteer/
scientific viewpoints coexist: in the former case, the end-user orientation of Cloud
is extended to a collaborative two-way Cloud in which users can buy and/or sell