Cloud Computing for Science and Engineering (Scientific and Engineering Computation)

The emergence of powerful, always-on cloud utilities has transformed how consumers interact with information technology, enabling video streaming, intelligent personal assistants, and the sharing of content. Businesses, too, have benefited from the cloud, outsourcing much of their information technology to cloud services. Science, however, has not fully exploited the advantages of the cloud. Could scientific discovery be accelerated if mundane chores were automated and outsourced to the cloud? Leading computer scientists Ian Foster and Dennis Gannon argue that it can, and in this book offer a guide to cloud computing for students, scientists, and engineers, with advice and many hands-on examples.

The book surveys the technology that underpins the cloud, new approaches to technical problems enabled by the cloud, and the concepts required to integrate cloud services into scientific work. It covers managing data in the cloud, and how to program these services; computing in the cloud, from deploying single virtual machines or containers to supporting basic interactive science experiments to gathering clusters of machines to do data analytics; using the cloud as a platform for automating analysis procedures, machine learning, and analyzing streaming data; building your own cloud with open source software; and cloud security.

The book is accompanied by a website, Cloud4SciEng.org, that provides a variety of supplementary material, including exercises, lecture slides, and other resources helpful to readers and instructors.

強大且始終可用的雲端工具的出現，改變了消費者與資訊科技的互動方式，使得視訊串流、智能個人助理和內容分享成為可能。企業也從雲端中受益，將大部分的資訊科技外包給雲端服務。然而，科學界尚未充分利用雲端的優勢。如果將瑣碎的事務自動化並外包給雲端，科學發現是否能夠加速？領先的計算機科學家Ian Foster和Dennis Gannon認為可以，並在本書中為學生、科學家和工程師提供了一個雲端運算指南，並提供建議和許多實際範例。

本書概述了支撐雲端的技術，以及雲端所帶來的解決技術問題的新方法，以及將雲端服務整合到科學工作中所需的概念。它涵蓋了在雲端中管理資料以及如何編寫這些服務的程式；在雲端中進行計算，從部署單個虛擬機器或容器到支援基本的互動科學實驗，再到集群機器進行數據分析；將雲端用作自動化分析程序、機器學習和分析流式數據的平台；使用開源軟體建立自己的雲端；以及雲端安全性。

本書附帶一個網站Cloud4SciEng.org，提供各種補充資料，包括練習題、講義和其他對讀者和教師有幫助的資源。