Prof. Eleni Karatza

Biography: Eleni Karatza is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Dr. Karatza's research interests include Computer Systems Modeling and Simulation, Performance Evaluation, Grid and Cloud Computing, Energy Efficiency in Large Scale Distributed Systems, Resource Allocation and Scheduling and Real-time Distributed Systems.

Professor Karatza is the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier Journal "Simulation Modeling Practice and Theory", Area Editor of the "Journal of Systems and Software" of Elsevier, and she has been Guest Editor of Special Issues in multiple International Journals. http://agent.csd.auth.gr/~karatza/

Title: Cloud Computing Challenges – Performance Perspective

Summary: Advances in networks and computing systems have led many aspects of our daily life to depend on distributed interconnected computing resources such as Clouds. The increasing popularity of cloud computing has offered computational services to many scientists, consumers and enterprises as utilities, on a pay-per-use approach.

There are important issues that must be addressed in cloud computing, such as: performance, resource allocation, efficient scheduling, energy conservation, reliability, protection of sensitive data, security and trust, cost, availability, quality. Effective management of cloud resources is crucial to use effectively the power of these systems and achieve high system performance.

The cloud computing paradigm can offer various types of services, such as computational resources for complex applications, web services, social networking, urban mobility, health care, environmental science, etc. Furthermore, the simultaneous usage of services from different Clouds can have additional benefits such as lower cost and high availability.

Complex applications may have different degrees of parallelism and may impose several restrictions and QoS requirements, therefore resource allocation and scheduling is a difficult task in clouds where there are many alternative heterogeneous computers. The scheduling algorithms must seek a way to maintain a good response time to leasing cost ratio. Adequate data security and availability are critical issues that have to be considered along with energy-efficient solutions that are required to minimize the impact of cloud computing on the environment. Recently, Big Data has become one of the most important research fields in science, engineering, enterprise, biology, healthcare, etc. However, in order that cloud computing will be a platform for supporting big data applications, appropriate algorithms are required for acquiring knowledge from a variety of big and not centrally collected data.

In this talk we will present state-of-the-art research covering a variety of concepts on cloud computing, based on existing or simulated cloud systems, that provide insight into problems solving and we will provide future directions in the cloud computing area.