WORKSHOP

Dronacharya College of Engineering organized a one day workshop on Cloud Computing in association with NITTTR Chandigarh through ICT on 29th August 2014. 67 students of different departments attended the workshop enthusiastically.

The workshop included three sessions. The first session was on overview of Cloud Computing and security issues in cloud. Dr. Kirti started with the general introduction of Cloud Computing, listing its benefits and implementation. Dr. Kirti described that Cloud Computing focuses on maximizing the effectiveness of the shared resources. Cloud resources are usually not only shared by multiple users but are also dynamically reallocated per demand. Dr. Kirti also explained that in a Cloud Computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead. Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the Cloud Computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.

In the second session, Mr. Bhupender Kumar discussed Mobile Cloud Computing and Android Application Development with the students. Mr. Kumar told that mobile devices are constrained by their processing power, battery life and storage. However, Cloud Computing provides an illusion of infinite computing resources. Mobile Cloud Computing is a new platform combining the mobile devices and Cloud Computing to create a new infrastructure, whereby cloud performs the heavy lifting of computing-intensive tasks and storing massive amounts of data. In this new architecture, data processing and data storage happen outside of mobile devices. Mr. Kumar also focused on the various research areas as well as the challenges of Mobile Cloud Computing with students. He also discussed that a mobile cloud approach enables developers to build applications designed specifically for mobile users without being bound by the mobile operating system and the computing or memory capacity of the smartphone. Mobile Cloud Computing centered are generally accessed via a mobile browser from a remote webserver, typically without the need for installing a client application on the recipient phone and hence referred as MoClo, a combination of MObile CLOud.

In the last session, Ms. Ritu Kapoor discussed Cloudsim, a simulation tool. CloudSim provides a generalized and extensible simulation framework that enables seamless modelling and simulation of app performance. By using CloudSim, developers can focus on specific systems design issues that they want to investigate, without getting concerned about details related to cloud - based infrastructures and services. Ms. Ritu also discussed various mechanisms for scheduling along with the need for simulation in Cloud Computing. She also discussed that CloudSim, which is a toolkit for the modelling and simulation of Cloud Computing environments- comes to the rescue. It provides system and behavioral modelling of the Cloud Computing components. Simulation of cloud environments and applications to evaluate performance can provide useful insights to explore such dynamic, massively distributed, and scalable environments.

The workshop was very informative as the students learnt various topics related to Cloud Computing and the areas of research associated with it. All the sessions were very interactive as students cleared their doubts during the workshop.

Some Glimpses: