Building a more resourceful cloud

While managers may anticipate how cloud computing will one day ease IT headaches, the purveyors of cloud services themselves for all that need to furthermore fine-tune the way their cloud services are metered and managed in order to make in point of fact flexible cloud computing a reality.

The first round of papers presented at the Usenix "HotCloud 2011" Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, held this week in Portland, Oregon, focused on exploring new approaches in scheduling workloads in the cloud that could benefit both cloud users and providers.

Job scheduling, in which multiple compute jobs are balanced across a single compute node, is not a new issue in IT, nevertheless its importance is paramount in cloud computing.

Other variables that cloud computing services should take into account include if the customer wants a job executed quickly or at the lowest cost possible, or some combination in between, noted Damien Zufferey, one of the researchers from the Institute of Science and Research Austria who developed a technique that would allow users to trade off between speed and the cost of running a job. The faster the customer wants the job to execute, the more that customer should pay; whereas economy jobs may take longer to finish, he argued.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general innovation breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com