Cloud Computing has recently received more attention than many exciting Page 3 notables. It is a model of distributed computation which promises to provide huge benefits to application providers and their users. Application providers have the illusion of infinite resources available on demand and users can access complex, data rich applications from any browser with a reasonable expectation of good performance. Perhaps more exciting is the promise of drastically lowering the cost of deploying new applications so that almost anyone, from anywhere can provide a software service on the internet which is available to all.

In this talk, I will try to separate reality from hype by taking a first principles view of the field. My bias will be towards emphasizing the role of the network, although I will cover other aspects as well. I will also outline some research challenges.

About the Speaker:

Abhay Parekh is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Berkeley. He is also a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. Prof. Parekh's research focuses on Computer Networking. He received his S.M and Ph.D. degrees from MIT. His papers on Generalized Processing Sharing are among the highest cited in the field and he has successfully applied his research to practice at Bell Labs, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Sun Microsystems and at FastForward Networks, a content distribution company that he co-founded and sold for $1.5 billion. He is a winner of the IEEE William Bennett Prize Paper Award and the Infocom Best Paper Award.