Hany H. Ammar

Cloud Computing Benefits and Challenges

Abstract:
Resource availability is a key factor to achieve prosperity of any society, and particularly important are computing resources, which are needed in many applications, such as scientific modeling and visualization, improvement of quality of learning opportunities, helping companies in their typical day-to-day business and in research and development activities. However, to attain their full potential, computing resources need to be efficiently utilized preferably in an aggregated manner.Cloud Computing has recently emerged as a new computing paradigm based on the concept of virtualization with the goal of creating a shared and highly scalable computing infrastructure from physical and virtual resources to deliver seamless and on-demand provisioning of software, hardware, and data as services. The Cloud is a type of parallel and distributed computing designed to scale and share computing resources among multiple consumers. This yields improved utilization rates, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle.This talk will discuss some of the benefits and challenges of cloud computing and the idea of leveraging this technology to benefit the academic institutions.