Cloud Computing for Science and Engineering

by Ian Foster, Dennis B. Gannon

A guide to cloud computing for students, scientists, and engineers, with advice and many hands-on examples. The emergence of powerful, always-on cloud utilities has transformed how consumers interact with information technology, enabling video streaming, intelligent personal assistants, and the sharing of content. Businesses, too, have benefited from the cloud, outsourcing much of their information technology to cloud services. Science, however, has not fully exploited the advantages of the cloud. Could scientific discovery be accelerated if mundane chores were automated and outsourced to the cloud? Leading computer scientists Ian Foster and Dennis Gannon argue that it can, and in this book offer a guide to cloud computing for students, scientists, and engineers, with advice and many hands-on examples.

The book surveys the technology that underpins the cloud, new approaches to technical problems enabled by the cloud, and the concepts required to integrate cloud services into scientific work. It covers managing data in the cloud, and how to program these services; computing in the cloud, from deploying single virtual machines or containers to supporting basic interactive science experiments to gathering clusters of machines to do data analytics; using the cloud as a platform for automating analysis procedures, machine learning, and analyzing streaming data; building your own cloud with open source software; and cloud security.

The book is accompanied by a website that provides a variety of supplementary material, including exercises, lecture slides, and other resources helpful to readers and instructors.

392 pages, Hardcover

Published September 29, 2017

Reviews

[Matt Heavner · Rating 3 out of 5]

A broad overview of cloud computing (with a focus on applications for Science & Engineering) - definitely a textbook. This goes for breadth (looking at three "technologies" for each aspect of cloud). I think this is a great snapshot but it will quickly go out of date - the authors admit this a few times and promise updates on the accompanying web site and new editions of the book. Very much in the textbook business model. The content was variable - not a surprise given 2+2 authors. The book was interesting and a good perspective throughout, but I found it much more interesting and informative beginning at Chapter 10. The sections on building your own cloud were ok, but those especially seemed likely to go stale quickly. If I were rewriting, I would consider cutting part IV (build you own cloud) and make that into an accompanying "lab notebook" for this textbook. The jupyter notebooks that accompany are a great aspect of the textbook. The quotes to kick off each chapter were very well selected:

"I've also grown weary of reading about clouds in a book." -George Carlin