Price per CPU/Hour: Sun's COO speaks about his views on Utility Computing

The power of Grid Computing is enabling Tech-Companies to provide multitude of IT services with flexible price models. There has been a lot of research on how Data/Computing virtualization (Data/Compute Sources seamlessly knittted together across administrative boudaries ) can be enabled through a unifying "Grid Services Arcitecture". Take a look at how some of the big companies are trying to cash in with their versions of Grid Provisioning systems.I like the way Sun'COO Jonathan Schwartz plays around with Industry Trends. He writes in his Blog "Now as you probably know, the IT industry is obsessed with "virtualization." It's the buzzword of the day (sorry, couldn't resist). But I wanted to try a new theory - "What would you think," I asked, "if Sun built out a farm of 20,000 CPU's, all running Solaris, divisable into "Trusted" containers? And I sold you the right to use (RTU) an industry standard OS/CPU combination in increments of cpu-hours? Solaris/Opteron or Solaris/SPARC, you pick. We'll run all your Red Hat apps in a Janus partition, and spare you the license cost."
He goes on to say, "Let's keep this simple. We'll provision cpu's by the hour running Solaris Containers. In Siberia, for all I care (to keep cooling/real estate costs low - no offense to our friends in Siberia). And we'll tell our customers - if you have comptutational workloads, that require 10's or 100's or 1,000's of cpu's, for defined periods of time (ie, 5 hours, or 3 days or 3 months) - discrete jobs like rendering a movie, or doing a monte carlo or geophysical simulation, or modeling a protein - then we can run your loads on demand for less than anyone in the industry.........One man's virtualization is another man's web service. The era of mapping workloads to network service infrastructure is officially underway. "

Full version of his blog post available at  http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20040920.

Issues of Security/Privacy in Distributed Bioinformatics

Biological data sets are constantly evolving with a tremendous pace at geographically distributed places under different administrators. The need for a combined data analysis over distributed data sets is always there mainly to speedup research in drug discovery, analysis and verification which in turn reduces the time to market the eventual drug. Now the problem is that the biological data is so sensitive that sharing it across administrative boundaries may mean a lot of damage to the privacy of the subjects that this data is concerned with. How to make sure that we get the true benefits of the distributed bioinformatics and yet not harm the privacy/security constraints of the individual organizations? Privacy Preserving data mining comes to the rescue here. The idea was put forth by IBM and HP researchers independently. The solutions developed for privacy preserving data mining are so far very poor in scaling with large number of participants. Considering the future is all about collaboration, it is paramount that the research be conducted for developing scalable distributed privacy preserving data mining solutions.

Waseem Ahmad
http://www2.uic.edu/~wahmad1

Call for Papers:: FIT04

http://multimedia.ece.uic.edu/FIT04/

Important Dates
Paper submissions due: September 22nd, 2004
Notification of acceptance: October 15th, 2004
Camera Ready papers due: November 15th, 2004
Days of the workshop:December 20 - 21, 2004

The workshop is scheduled to hold in Islamabad. The idea is to enable collaboration between US and Pakistani researchers.
The main areas chosen for this workshop include the following:

1. Information and Network Security.
2. Communication and Networking Technologies.
3. IT based Applications.
4. Embedded Systems and Pervasive Computing.

IT researchers/academicians/practitioners with an interest in any of the above broad IT research areas are invited to submit a technical paper outlining their view of the present status of research in topics related to these broad areas and what they consider to be the most important and promising future research agendas. We encourage magazine style submissions with less focus on deeper technical details and more emphasis on future research problems, their formulations, and issues that need further exploration. The target audience for the workshop is both researchers and practitioners who are interested in taking part in forming the future IT research agendas and fostering global collaborations especially with researchers in the US and Pakistan.

Submissions are required to be registered and submitted through online conference manager available at http://multimedia.ece.uic.edu/FIT04/confman/REG-paper/