Information Management in the Cloud (Dagstuhl Seminar 11321)

Abstract

Cloud computing is emerging as a new paradigm for highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and adaptable computing on large clusters of off-the-shelf computers. Cloud architectures strive to massively parallelize complex processing tasks through a computational model motivated by functional programming. They provide highly available storage and compute capacity through distribution and redundancy. Most importantly, Cloud architectures adapt to changing requirements by dynamically provisioning new (virtualized) compute or storage nodes. Economies of scale enable cloud providers to provide compute and storage powers to a multitude of users. On the infrastructure side, such a model has been pioneered by Amazon with EC2, whereas software as a service on cloud infrastructures with multi-tenancy has been pioneered by Salesforce.com.

The Dagstuhl Seminar 11321 ``Information Management in the Cloud'' brought together a diverse set of researchers and practitioners with a broad range of expertise. The purpose of this seminar was to consider and to discuss causes, opportunities, and solutions for technologies, and architectures that enable cloud information management. The scope ranged from web-scale log file analysis using cluster computing techniques to dynamic provisioning of resources in data centers, covering topics from the areas of analytical and transactional processing, parallelization of large scale data and compute intensive operations as well as implementation techniques for fault tolerance.