IBM, EU and European universities work to create cost-effective cloud computing

IBM is establishing a consortium in association with the European Union and a number of universities to conduct a research into new cloud-computing models in a move to reduce costs for hosting and maintaining Internet-based services.

IBM believes that the new design and deployment models would allow cost cuts as compared with the traditional models which are more complex and need more time and finances to maintain them. Under the new project the researchers hope to create a framework to reduce substantially the design and deployment time for such services by hosting them in a central cloud environment.

A project called Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI), that was introduced by IBM Research last year, will be the task of the current research group. The project bases on interoperation hubs that provide cloud-based environments in which flexible Internet-based software and services can easily be created and deployed.

The universities involved in the project include Sapienza Universita di Roma, Italy; Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy; Imperial College, United Kingdom; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; University of Tartu in Estonia and Collibra NV in Belgium.