Cloud computing infrastructure prototype for university education and research

Abstract

In this paper we provide an overview of the cloud computing paradigm and discuss its application in the form of a prototype for collaboration between academic institutions. "Cloud computing" is increasing in popularity nowadays, but many organizations understand cloud computing in different ways. Although almost everyone acknowledges the importance of more efficient resource utilization and a shift from desktop and mainframe applications to the client-server, distributed, multi-processing, n-tier, grid and, finally, to the cloud computing paradigm. We briefly analyze the cloud computing approach of computation and describe our current and accomplished educational and research projects, related to the discussed topic and our experience with educational infrastructure design. Then we evaluate the successful implementations of cloud computing models at educational institutions and the different ways to implement cloud computing. As the result, we present our research and education prototype for education infrastructures which is ready for experiment. In the conclusion, we summarize the results and provide a description for taking cloud computing infrastructure implementation and development to the next step.