GoingToMeet

Computing is being transformed to a model consisting of services that are commoditized and delivered in a manner similar to traditional utilities such as water, electricity, gas, and telephony. In such a model, users access services based on their requirements without regard to where the services are hosted or how they are delivered. Several computing paradigms have promised to deliver this utility computing vision and these include Grid computing, and more recently Cloud computing.

Cloud computing has recently emerged as one of the buzzwords in the ICT industry. Several IT vendors are promising to offer storage, application and computation hosting services, and provide coverage in several continents, offering Service-Level Agreements (SLA) backed performance and uptime promises for their services. While these ‘clouds’ are the natural evolution of traditional clusters and data centers, they are distinguished by following a "utility" pricing model where customers are charged based on their utilisation of computational resources, storage and transfer of data. These emerging services have reduced the cost of computation, application hosting and content storage and delivery by several orders of magnitude, however there is significant complexity involved in ensuring applications, services and data can scale when needed to ensure consistent and reliable operation under peak loads.

To provide a dedicated forum for sharing recent R&D advances and industrial innovations in "Utility Computing" area, we have initiated this new conference series "International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing". This conference series has emerged out of the past two successful Cloud computing symposiums (Cloud 2009 held in Shanghai, China; and Cloud 2010 held in Melbourne, Australia) and focuses on both principles of "Utility computing" and its practical realisation in industry in different forms including Cloud Computing.