Cloud Computers: Reaching New Heights


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Cloud ComputingCloud computing Conference, Carnegie Mellon
 In today's world, the effective integration of information and communications technology into a business plan is essential to success. For many potential entrepreneurs, the costs of some technologies may seem cost-prohibitive. But because of a new joint venture, a new era of virtualized computer services that can store data and provide an offsite server is on the horizon. Cloud Computing is coming to Qatar.

Recently announced as the one of the first projects to bring cloud computing into the Middle East, Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Qatar University and Texas A&M University have collaborated with IBM to launch the Cloud Computing Center, which will be initially located at Carnegie Mellon University. "The project is all about virtualization, where we have a large pool of servers and provide clients with virtual machines that run their operating systems as Linux or Windows, thus offering them the software platform they need", explains Majd Sakr, Carnegie Mellon University's lead on the project.

"It's like the way people use electricity," Sakr explains. "You can either have the electric generators, at your house, which is like housing your own server, or pay for electricity as a service, and only pay for the amount of usage that you have. The latter option is similar to what cloud computing offers: many entities share the cloud, and receive "always-on" reliable computing services, thus leveraging the speed and quality of their processes. The benefits for businesses are not just in terms of speed or quality, but costs will be significantly reduced. When you join the cloud, your initial costs from housing the servers will go down, your power usage will be greatly reduced, and your will be less likely to spend heavily on maintenance."

The project is expected to impact numerous fields in Qatar, not only businesses. "When we thought about the center, we asked ourselves about the current applications now running in Qatar that own vast amounts of data thus require a super-computer service" Majd explains. "Oil and gas, academic and scientific research applications, health-related applications, genetics, bio-informatics, environment and energy, forecasting market potential and making future projections, risk management, risk assessments are among the numerous potential fields to realize the power of Cloud Computing."

"We think of cloud computing as a public system that enables innovation. If we don't do these things in Qatar, innovation will be limited to those who have access to these resources," says Sakr who explains that the project is currently in its first phase. ""Phase two would be to replicate what we have here at Carnegie Mellon, Texas and Qatar Universities and make the three system look to the outside user as one cloud, thus tripling the capacity of computer power and memory and disk space, so we can target larger applications".

Just as people turned from writing things on paper to storing them on their computers, they may very well soon be shifting from hardware storage to computer clouds that are limitless and not restricted to a physical location to store data.

- By: Mina Nagy








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