General
How to Read a Paper
Have you ever read a meta-paper? This paper will teach you how to efficiently read papers in three passes. Consequently, you will also learn how to write better papers and get better reviews.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing: state-of-the-art and research challenges
This paper is highly recommended for those who are entering into the clouds. It is referenced in my presentation Cloud Computing - Research Challenges Overview. It is a survey of cloud computing, explaining its advantages, architecture, state-of-the-art implementations and the following research challenges:
Automated service provisioning: online mapping of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) such as QoS requirements to low-level resource requirement;
Virtual machine migration: this should be done to avoid hotspots;
Server consolidation: to minimize energy consumption;
Energy management: powering and cooling are the responsibles for 53% of data center costs that can be reduced by means of energy efficient hardware and energy-aware job scheduling for instance;
Traffic management and analysis: to make many of the management and planning decisions;
Data security: confidentiality and auditability;
Software frameworks: in order to leverage resources of many nodes;
Storage technologies and data management: concerns with POSIX compatibility;
Novel cloud architectures: small-size data centers can be more advantageous than big ones operated in centralized fashion.
Unclouded Vision
Unclouded Vision aims to fill the gap between "ultra-distributed" systems, such as P2P file sharing and mobile decentralized social networks (joindiaspora.com, peerson.net), and the cloud. The proposed architecture defines and uses Droplets to give back to the users total control of their data that can still be used by cloud providers (such as SaaS like Facebook), as long as the user allows it.