The purpose of this award is to support a PI meeting that is bringing together principal investigators, some of them are currently supported via the CISE Directorate in the NSF, in a workshop setting to collectively develop a vision of the Science of Cloud Computing.
Rationale for the Workshop. With the growing maturity and popularity of cloud computing in the commercial arena, cloud computing is likely to become a dominant computing substrate for diverse types of applications and services in the future in the areas of scientific computing, transportation applications, and health-care informatics. Although many of the research advances made by the research investigators funded by NSF's CNS Division have been critical to the success of cloud computing, the intent of this event was to help NSF and other funding agencies to develop a coherent vision of cloud computing from a scientific perspective. With this goal in mind, funding was requested and approved to organize a workshop style meeting of approximately 50-60 NSF principal investigators to develop a coherent research vision and agenda for the future research in cloud computing. Activities & Outcomes 1. In late December 2010, an invitation letter was electronicallydistributed to the PIs in the CNS Division. PI Agrawal and Program Director Goudaidentified the following topical areas as the focus of the meeting: Cloud Architectures and Systems Network Support for the Cloud Data Portability, Consistency, and Management Programming Models for the Cloud Fault Masking in the Cloud Cloud Security, Privacy, and Auditing Cloud Debugging, Certification, and Update Cloud Self-Monitoring and Autonomic Control Cloud Inter-operability and Standardization Green Clouds Cloud Test-Beds 2. Subsequently, a submission site was set-up at https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/CLOUDW2011 for electronic submissions from potential participants. The submission format was a 2 page write-up with the following guidelines: In the first page, please include your name, affiliation, and email address. Also identify two topics (selected from the 11 topics listed above) that best fit your research interests in Cloud Computing. Also provide a half page summary of your current research activities related to Cloud Computing, if any. In the second page, write a one page abstract of future research problems that you think are important and you plan to pursue, if you are to be funded by the NSF, related to Cloud Computing. The cut-off date for the submission was set to January 17, 2011. 3. The limited invitation resulted in an overwhelming response fromthe NSF PIs. In particular we received closed to 96 submissions. 4. After a careful evaluation we selected 60 submissions and sent them an acceptance letter in late January 2011. 5. Based on the accepted submissions, approximately half of the invitees were selected for oral presentations and the remaining were asked to present their vision during the pposter session. The workshop program and presentations are available at http://nsfcloud2011.cs.ucsb.edu/. 6. The workshop was held over two days on March 17, 2011 and March 18,2011 at the Waterview Conference Center, Arlington, VA. 7. In addition to the academic participants, we also invited speakers fromindustry: Michael Kozuch, INTEL Roger Barga, Microsoft 8. The workshop was structured based on the 11 topical areas and we had presentations in each of the areas.
