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Future directions

Ultimately, individual projects and agencies need to make their own judgements on the relative cost and merit of cloud based services as compared to grids.

In a White paper chapter devoted to the study of grids and clouds, the EU`s e-infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) concluded that the long term interests of the research community would be served by access to and use of a mixture of grid and cloud-based services and technologies.

The e-IRG White paper recommended the following strategies as being integral to ensuring a healthy future for European e-infrastructures:

- Investigate the integration of cloud-like technologies, especially virtualisation, into existing e-infrastructures
- Encourage the development of grid services on top of virtual infrastructures
- Encourage the integration of cloud-based services into existing e-infrastructures 
- Promote the development of open-source components to build clouds
- Support the development of standards-based grid interfaces to cloud services
- Explore the application of grid technology for the federation of clouds
- Aim for high-level efficiency in both grid and cloud computing

Want to find out more? Take a look at the e-ScienceBriefing ‘Cloud computing: What’s on the horizon?’ from e-ScienceTalk.




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