International Workshop on Cloud Computing Application (IWCA)

Accenture Technology Labs, India is hosting a workshop in conjunction with the 19th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC 2012) at Pune, India during December 18 - December 21, 2012

Cloud Computing is undoubtedly becoming an emerging platform for both the industrial and scientific community. The promise of scale, elasticity, and “pay-as-you-go” pricing models is attracting corporate IT staff, researchers, and individual software application developers. With the advent of “Platform-as-a-service” or PaaS, there is significant support for design, build, test, and deployment tools in the cloud. Organizations the world over are spending money and effort on experimenting with whether Cloud is suitable for new application development and if it is mature enough for migrating existing applications. However, Cloud is not just another new platform to write applications on. We believe that to harness the true potential of Cloud in terms of scalability and agility, one needs to design and implement the applications in new ways. For example, the traditional Apache server model of process-per-connection (PPC) is not scalable enough to handle the load bursts that cloud-based websites face today (Slashdot effect) and as a result, an event-driven server architecture is needed. Similarly, very fast content write and lookup requirements of Extreme Transaction Processing (as in Twitter, Facebook, and similar social networking sites) have given rise to new genre of Key-Value stores with faster performance and more efficient access. No SQL databases in the Cloud are optimized for varied special purpose requirements, such as search and range queries (compared to RDBMS databases which are optimized for serving structured queries only). Today’s cloud-scale data processing frameworks like Hadoop for map-reduce also bring newer dimensions to batch-processing frameworks. Furthermore, PaaS platforms introduce the paradigm of multi-tenancy at the application level with their own set of challenges by imposing resource quotas.

Ramarathnam Venkatesan, Microsoft Research
Ramarathnam Venkatesan graduated under Leonid A Levin in 1990, and became a senior member of technical Staff in Mathematics and Cryptology Research group in Bell Communications Research Lab in Morristown NJ until 1997. He has been a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. His interest are Cryptography, Security and Algorithms, and founded a research group with that name in Microsoft Research, Bangalore. He has worked on various areas, from a security point of view, on Programming Languages & tools, Data Bases, Hardware, Machine Learning and Data Mining.

Gaurav Makkar, Technical Director in Advanced Technology Group, NetApp
Gaurav Makkar is a Technical Director in the CTO Office of NetApp, responsible for the innovation agenda with a 3-5 year impact window. He is currently leading investigations around the impact of Storage Class Memory to storage architectures. He is also driving web-scale and cloud integrated storage investigations, at NetApp. He is also devising NetApp's strategy in the analytics space - both "analytics for storage" and "storage for unstructured data analytics", the latter in the context of Hadoop and NoSQL databases. Earlier, he has created object storage solutions and worked on NetApp's broad portfolio of data protection solutions. All his current and future work has a deep tie-in into Shared Virtual Infrastructure and applications. He has been investigating technologies impacting cloud infrastructures and the evolution of data centers.

Workshop Organizers

Shubhashis Sengupta, Accenture Technology Labs, India
shubhashis.sengupta@accenture.com

Sanjoy Paul, Accenture Technology Labs, India
sanjoy.paul@accenture.com

Rajkumar Buyya, CLOUDS Laboratory, University of Melbourne
raj@csse.unimelb.edu.au

Workshop Program Committee [Partial]:

Sorav Bansal, IIT Delhi

T.S. Mohan, Infosys Technologies Limited

Gaargi B. Dasgupta, IBM Research Lab, India

Sriram Rajamani, Microsoft Research

Pushpendra Singh, IIIT Delhi

Gaurav Gupta, IIIT Delhi

Vikrant Kaulgud, Accenture

Vibhu S. Sharma, Accenture

Vijay Agneeswaran, Cognizant Technology

Srinath Srinivasa, IIIT Bangalore