An overview of cloud computing

Cloud computing is the capacity to perform computing outside the usual way of relying on local machines. Cloud computing relies on shared resources to handle the needed calculation or treatment. It shares the same aspects as Grid computing where both technologies have its processing power gathered to resolve or treat problems too heavy for a standalone machine (server or a personal computer).

The goal of cloud computing is to harness high supercomputing power to perform high-level computations in consumer-oriented applications, such as finance, personalized information delivery, data storage, and so on.

In order to perform this overwhelming task, cloud computing relies on a gigantic number of super powerful servers (blades…) connected through an extremely fast connection (InfiniBand (IB)) to share the workload across their computing units. This kind of infrastructure runs on specially configured systems, where they are linked together to simplify the task. Some...