Based on the promising developments in Cloud Computing technologies in recent years, commercial computing resource services (e.g. Amazon EC2) or software-as-a-service offerings (e.g. Salesforce.com) came into existence. However, the relatively weak business exploitation, participation, and...

Volunteer Grids, in which users share computing resources altruistically, play a critical role in fostering research. Sharing and collaboration in Volunteer Grids is determined by many factors. These determinants define the participation in Grids and the amount of contribution to such Grids....

The current access policies and funding schemes of computing e-infrastructures represent a huge challenge for the sustainable growth of computing e-infrastructures and a serious jeopardy for investments made into these e-infrastructures. In order to be able to address these issues, the economics...

Cloud computing, which can be described as a technology for provisioning computing infrastructure as a service, runtime platform as a service, and software as a service, is considered as a keystone for innovation in the IT area. However, a limiting factor to innovation through cloud computing...

As cloud federation allows companies in need of computational resources to use computational resources hosted by different cloud providers, it reduces the cost of IT infrastructure by lowering capital and operational expenses. This is the result of economies of scale and the possibility for...

Due to the large variety in computing resources and, consequently, the large number of different types of service level agreements (SLAs), computing resource markets face the problem of a low market liquidity. Restricting the number of different resource types to a small set of standardized...

Cloud computing faces two business-related issues. First, the management of clouds requires not only technical skills but also the understanding of the business side of these systems. Traditional distributed systems research did not require this understanding, simply assuming that all components...

Cloud computing aims at allowing customers to utilize computational resources and software hosted by service providers. Thus, it shifts the complex and tedious resource and software management tasks typically done by customers to the service providers. Besides promising to eliminate these...

IP/MPLS service providers rely on transport networks to provide bandwidth on demand with the lowest possible provisioning time. However, due to the static nature of transport networks and the differences in the communication languages and switching systems, the IP/MPLS and transport network...

Social networks can be differentiated according to the type of entities (i.e., humans or objects) that are represented within them. These networks can be called human networks and social object networks, respectively. Actors in human networks can act strategically to maximize their own payoffs...