Is There a Cloud in Your Future?: Applications of "Cloud Computing" to Web-Scale Problems

Cloud computing refers to technology for exploiting large computer clusters to tackle "Web-scale" information processing problems, where immense quantities of data make traditional sequential processing impractical. Specifically, this initiative focuses on Google's MapReduce programming paradigm, which was specifically designed for processing extremely large data sets (And indeed used by Google itself for much of its production operations). Programs written in the MapReduce functional style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines.