Journal of Applied Computer Science & Mathematics (Jan 2010)
Are Free Cloud Services Productive? A Performance Study on End User Computing
Abstract
With the introduction of Cloud based services,today’s computing has gained a new paradigm shift towardsglobal, massive scale computing platforms, available for bothmacro and micro computing requirements. Although, there havebeen quite a few large scale Grid computing facilities forcommercial and research computing purposes, Cloud computingservices have extended their services to the individual end userswith limited computing requirements. This paper is focused onhow Cloud services impact on individual end users’ computingneeds in the perspective of system performance productivity.The paper covers the Cloud computing conceptual models withpresent services available. Importantly, the experiment is basedon free Cloud services dedicated for individual end users withlimited computing requirements, to evaluate the computingproductivity. The research results clearly indicate productivitybottlenecks on average computing users’ usage experiences, withCloud services; which open an appealing dialogue forresearchers to be indecisive on what they believe on Cloudservice benefits, and the way it should be used.