Browsing by Author "Tan, Tingxi"

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    An Assessment of Eucalyptus Version 1.4
    (2009-05-06T14:58:50Z) Kiddle, Cameron; Tan, Tingxi
    Cloud Computing is the emergent technology that promises on-demand, dynamic and easily accessible computing power. The “pay-as-you-use” scheme is attractive for small to medium sized businesses as these organizations are less inclined to purchase large amounts of physical machines to satisfy their immediate computing needs. Various cloud services are already available on the market. Many of them implement some form of dynamic provisioning of computing resources through the use of Virtual Machine (VM) tech- nologies like Xen [13], VMWare [28] or KVM [16]. Among them, the Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) [3] can be considered the most popular and mature solution. Eucalyptus [20], a cloud enabling infrastructure is the result of a research project from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Eucalyptus stands for “Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems”. It aims to provide a simple to set up cloud solution for the research and development of cloud driven applications. By combining common web-service, Linux tools and the Xen Virtual Machine Hypervisor, Eucalyptus successfully implemented partial functionality of the popular Amazon EC2. As a consequence of recreating a “free” version of EC2, this open source project has attracted much attention and it is scheduled to be included into Ubuntu 9.10 (code name Karmic Koala) [15], the to-be-release version of a popular Linux distribution. This document records a recent effort to evaluate Eucalyptus as a viable open source solution to cloud computing. The evaluation focuses on the design, setup, usability and performance of Eucalyptus. In Section 2, we discuss the general design goals and infrastructure layout of Eucalyptus. Section 3 documents the process of setting up a Eucalyptus environment. Section 4 covers the usage and general impressions of Eucalyptus’s functionalities. In Section 5, we developed a demonstrator to illustrate the potential real-world usage of Eucalyptus v1.4. Finally in Section 7 and 8, we provide some related work and a conclusion to this document.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Facebook Meets the Virtualized Enterprise
    (2008-07-15T22:16:05Z) Simmonds, Robert; Curry, Roger; Kiddle, Cameron; Markatchev, Nayden; Tan, Tingxi; Arlitt, Martin; Walker, Bruce
    “Web 2.0” and “cloud computing” are revolutionizing the way IT infrastructure is accessed and managed. Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and social networking platforms provide Internet users with easier mechanisms to produce Web content and to interact with each other. Cloud computing technologies are aimed at running applications as services over the Internet on a scalable infrastructure. They enable businesses that do not have the capital or technical expertise to support their own infrastructure to get access to computing on demand. They could also be used by large businesses to more efficiently manage their own infrastructure as an “internal cloud”. In this paper we explore the advantages of using Web 2.0 and cloud computing technologies in an enterprise setting to provide employees with a comprehensive and transparent environment for utilizing applications. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach we have developed an environment that uses Facebook (a social networking platform) to provide access to the Fire Dynamics Simulator (a legacy application). The application is supported using Virtual Appliances that are hosted in an internal cloud computing infrastructure that adapts dynamically to user demands. Initial feedback suggests this approach provides a much better user experience than the traditional standalone use of the application. It also simplifies the management and increases the effective utilization of the underlying IT resources.