Notes on Cloud Computing, 2010-04-26

CloudAV: N-Version Antivirus in the Network Cloud
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/fjgroup/pubs/usenix08-cloudav.pdf

Antivirus software fails to detect many modern threats and its increasing complexity has resulted in vulnerabilities that are being exploited by malware. This paper advocates a new model for malware detection on end hosts based on providing antivirus as an in-cloud network service. This model enables identification of malicious and unwanted software by multiple, heterogeneous detection engines in parallel, a technique we term ‘N-version protection’.  CloudAV includes a lightweight, cross-platform host agent and a network service with ten antivirus engines and two behavioral detection engines.

Yahoo! Reaches for the Stars with M45 Supercomputing Project
http://research.yahoo.com/node/1884

Named after a well-known open star cluster, M45 is a 4,000-processor supercomputer that’s one of the fifty most powerful systems in the world. The goal of the project: help academic researchers tackle some of the most complicated computing tasks known to humanity.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World
By David Easley and Jon Kleinberg
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex "connectedness" of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.

The book will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. (For more information, please see Cambridge's page for the book.)