A Tale of Clouds: Paradigm Comparisons and Some Thoughts on Research Issues

Cloud computing is an emerging computing paradigm. It aims to share data, calculations, and services transparently among users of a massive grid. Although the industry has started selling cloud-computing products, research challenges in various areas, such as UI design, task decomposition, task distribution, and task coordination, are still unclear. Therefore, we study the methods to reason and model cloud computing as a step toward identifying fundamental research questions in this paradigm. In this paper, we compare cloud computing with service computing and pervasive computing. Both the industry and research community have actively examined these three computing paradigms. We draw a qualitative comparison among them based on the classic model of computer architecture. We finally evaluate the comparison results and draw up a series of research questions in cloud computing for future exploration.