Dec 30, 2009
School of Engineering, Coimbatore
Cloud computing is the new buzzword in the online world. But what is it exactly? Nearly 400 delegates from industry and academia gathered at Amrita’s Coimbatore campus to attend India’s first-ever conference on this futuristic trend and find out for themselves.
“Cloud computing promises to define the future of computing,” they learned. “All over the world, leading IT companies like IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Google and Amazon are deploying clouds to share services and resources among partners and customers.”
But what exactly is the cloud? Formally defined as large virtualized server farms that provide web services and storage for enterprises and people, the term is actually an offshoot of the popular diagrammatic representation of the internet as a cloud of interconnected computers.
A cloud value chain of customers, partners and vendors could well become the new business model for many a business and enterprise. In this model, hardware, software and data storage services will be offered as a service through subscription, resulting in big earnings for companies and businesses.
In a practical demonstration, the cloud computing environment was replicated using IBM’s Blade Servers for Virtual Computing. Amrita products developed in-house such as the enterprise-grade Hospital Information System and A-View, the interactive e-learning platform were demoed in this environment.
Scholarly papers were presented by industry experts and researchers in this field from leading IT companies and universities such as IBM, Intel, Google, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Brocade, NetApp, Zoho, Infosys and University of California. There were several invited talks as well.*
The talks and the papers also addressed the conference sub-themes such as Green IT and Smart Grid, which focused on issues such as lower power consumption in data centers, smart controls, meters and sensors and usage of energy from renewable energy sources.
This conference jointly organized by Amrita’s Departments of Information Technology and International Initiatives was another green activity this year. On June 5, 2009, Chancellor Amma had declared that Amrita would observe the coming year as Green Year.
InMage and Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) co-sponsored the conference, in addition to IBM.
On the first day, Prof. K. Gangadharan, Organizing Chair, welcomed the participants. Dr. Sree Rajan of Fujitsu Labs of America and Mr. Vijay Suthankar of IBM provided an overview of the conference program.
Dr. P. Venkat Rangan, Vice-Chancellor of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham presided over the conference. Dr. S. V. Raghavan, Scientific Secretary, Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, was the honored guest at the closing ceremony where certificates were distributed to all participants.
Post the conference, it was decided to offer an advanced course on Cloud Computing to graduate and doctoral students at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham. The course will be taught jointly by several of the distinguished speakers at the conference and will avail Amrita’s world-class e-learning infrastructure.
*Technical Session # 1 – Cloud Infrastructure
• Dr. Kaladhar Voruganti, NetApp – Storage/Data as a Service
• Mr. Kumar Malavalli, Co-founder, Brocade – InMage – Cloud Storage**
• Mr. Vijay Sukthankar, Lead – WebSphere Technology Institute , IBM – SOA and Cloud
• Dr. Madhukar Korupolu, Google – MapReduce, BigTable and Resource Management Techniques
• Mr. Ravi Amble, Co-founder Rapidigm, Solugence – Cloud Computing Service Industry*
Technical Session # 2 – Cloud Applications
• Mr. Subu Goparaju, Vice-President, Infosys – Cloud Applications
• Mr. Shailesh Kumar, CEO, Zoho – Cloud Computing – What ‘IT’ is
• Mr. Rajan Raman – Advisory Software Engineer- LotusLive, IBM – Collaboration Services on the Cloud
• Mr. Ravi Shankar, Sun Microsystems – Preventing Denial-of-Service Attacks in Clouds
• Mr. Prakash Bettadapur, Cisco – Management Aspects of Cloud Computing
Technical Session # 3 – Green IT and Smart Grid
• Mr. Ram Krishnan, Brocade Networks – Dynamic Bandwidth/SLA Management for Cloud Computing Adoption
• Mr. Srihari Kumar, CEO, Leadforce1 – Delivering Secure Applications on the Cloud
• Prof. Darrel Long, University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) – Maximizing Efficiency By Trading Storage for Computation**
• Dr. Sambathnarayanan Parthasarathy, Consultant, Green DC, HPC-IBM – Green IT
• Dr. Rob Roy, SAI Technologies – Wireless Infrastructure for Smart Energy Grid**
** Through videoconferencing
