At the recent Usenix Annual Technical Conference, Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Vytautus Valancius described Transit Protocol, a system that would let cloud users customize the path their data takes as it travels through cloud computing platforms. Valancius says Transit Protocol enables users to set a path that matches the needs of a specific application. For example, he says Transit Protocol could let cloud providers connect to a variety of Internet service providers, and create a specially designed interface for customers to manage their access. Valancius says Transit protocol is currently being used to power several academic experiments at sites across the United States. “As cloud platforms mature to host increasingly complex and demanding applications, customers will want a greater degree of flexibility and control over these resources,” notes University of British Columbia professor Andrew Warfield.
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Microsoft’s annual TechFair visited Silicon Valley so that Microsoft product teams and local research labs could see the latest developments. One spotlighted TechFair project seeks to supply more data to researchers studying strategies for protecting fish in San Francisco Bay Area waterways by using computers to mash up various data sources and present the results to scientists in an Excel spreadsheet. Microsoft tools are making it possible to more deeply analyze the numerous variables that are weighed in deciding the optimum underlying conditions for migratory salmon. Microsoft research lab director Rick Rashid says the same core system is being used to monitor weather data in Southeast Asia and seismic data in the Swiss Alps. Ensuring that researchers maintain individual privacy when they offer aggregate data was the focus of work by TechFair presenter Cynthia Dwork, who demonstrated a mathematical formula for determining whether a particular data set is likely private or not. Also on display at TechFair was a project investigating the possibility of a smartphone choosing on the fly whether to run parts of a program on the phone itself or transmit the computational work to a remote server or PC.
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