Cloud Computing Forecast: Sunny

Amin Vahdat, director of UCSD's Center for Networked Systems

If half of a company's networking bandwidth is allocated to New York it could be going to waste during the middle of the night when the company's other operations in more active time zones in London and Tokyo are being slammed. Jacobs School computer scientists have designed, implemented and evaluated a new bandwidth management system for applications that are capable of solving this problem with "clouds" of computers.

The new algorithm enables distributed rate limiters to work together to enforce global bandwidth rate limits, and dynamically shift bandwidth allocations across multiple sites or networks, according to current network demands. Alex C. Snoeren, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), led the research team that developed the algorithm, and Ph.D. candidate Barath Raghavan walked away with the 2007 SIGCOMM best student paper award. He was the first author on the cloud-computing paper.

And the clouds don't stop there — even in sunny San Diego. Thanks to a collaboration with Google, the CSE Department recently launched a new cloud computing course. AminVahdat, a CSE professor and director of UCSD's Center for Networked Systems, taught the inaugural class. "I just finished teaching our cloud computing class for undergraduates and I have already heard back from students who are being heavily recruited by industry because they know how to write software that runs on clusters," Vahdat says.