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Published online 24 October 2007 | Nature 449, 963 (2007) | doi:10.1038/449963a
News: Business
Head in the clouds
'Cloud computing' is being pitched as a new nirvana for scientists drowning in data. But can it deliver? Eric Hand investigates.
Dennis Gannon, a computer scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington, knows all about bringing huge amounts of computer power to bear on complex scientific problems. He has at his disposal, for the purpose, Big Red, one of the world's largest supercomputers, right there on the campus.
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I had a few concerns/questions about how much can now be offloaded to clouds. I'm particularly interested in data intensive applications, e.g. DBMSs and digital libraries. These depend on the operating system to access files or parts of files. Do we need to wait for them to be ported to the OS run on the cloud's virtual machine? (Even if that OS is a familiar one, e.g., Linux, will it run efficiently?) Second, have commercial software vendors begun creating licensing models for putting their software on the cloud? Or is one confined to freeware?