A Novel Programming Paradigm for the Cloud

The appearance of the first commercial Cloud Computing platforms has represented a significant step towards the materialization of the vision of utility-computing.

By shifting data and computation away from local servers towards very large scale, world-wide spread data centers, Cloud Computing promises very compelling benefits for both cloud consumers and cloud services providers: freeing corporations from large IT capital investments via usage-based pricing schemes, drastically lowering barriers to entry and capital costs; leveraging the economies of scale for both services providers and users of the cloud; facilitating deployment of services; attaining unprecedented scalability levels.

However, the promise of infinite scalability catalyzing much of the recent hype about Cloud Computing is still menaced by one major pitfall: the lack of programming paradigms and abstractions capable of bringing the power of parallel programming into the hands of ordinary programmers.

This project will address precisely this issue by developing Cloud-TM (Transactional Memory), a self-optimizing middleware platform aimed at simplifying the development and administration of applications deployed on large scale Cloud Computing infrastructures.