Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and Nimbus are three major open-source cloud-computing software platforms. The overall function of these systems is to manage the provisioning of virtual machines for a cloud providing infrastructure-as-a-service. These various open-source projects provide an important alternative for those who do not wish to use a commercially provided cloud.We provide a comparison and analysis of each of these systems. We begin with a short summary comparing the current raw feature set of these projects. After that, we deepen our analysis by describing how these cloud management frameworks relate to the many other software components required to create a functioning cloud computing system. We also analyse the overall structure of each of these projects and address how the differing features and implementations reflect the different goals of each of these projects. Lastly, we discuss some of the common challenges that emerge in setting up any of these frameworks and suggest avenues of further research and development. These include the problem of fair scheduling in absence of money, eviction or preemption, the difficulties of network configuration, and the frequent lack of clean abstractions.

CrowdsourcingCrowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed ideas, services, or content by requesting contributions from a large group of people. Amazon Mechanical Turk is a web marketplace for crowdsourcing microtasks, such as answering surveys and image tagging. We explored the limits of crowdsourcing by using Mechanical Turk for a more complicated task: analysis and creation of wind simulations.Harnessing Crowdworkers for EngineeringOur investigation examined the feasibility of using crowdsourcing for complex, highly technical tasks. This was done to determine if the benefits of crowdsourcing could be harnessed to accurately and effectively contribute to solving complex real world engineering problems. Of course, untrained crowds cannot be used as a mere substitute for trained expertise. Rather, we sought to understand how crowd workers can be used as a large pool of labor for a preliminary analysis of complex data.Virtual Wind TunnelWe compared the skill of the anonymous crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk with that of civil engineering graduate students, making a first pass at analyzing wind simulation data. For the first phase, we posted analysis questions to Amazon crowd workers and to two groups of civil engineering graduate students. A second phase of our experiment instructed crowd workers and students to create simulations on our Virtual Wind Tunnel website to solve a more complex task.ConclusionsWith a sufficiently comprehensive tutorial and compensation similar to typical crowd-sourcing wages, we were able to enlist crowd workers to effectively complete longer, more complex tasks with competence comparable to that of graduate students with more comprehensive, expert-level knowledge. Furthermore, more complex tasks require increased communication with the workers. As tasks become more complex, the employment relationship begins to become more akin to outsourcing than crowdsourcing. Through this investigation, we were able to stretch and explore the limits of crowdsourcing as a tool for solving complex problems.

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Software engineering has been fundamentally transformed by a collaborative development model. Facilitated by powerful tools, even a modest software project can benefit from a global virtual community of developers. We propose that the collaborative techniques used in modern software development can also be applied to other fields, such as structural engineering. This requires the creation of editors, compilers, evaluators, and other tools that are analogous but not identical to those used in software. To demonstrate this, we have created a prototype Virtual Wind Tunnel (VWT) which implements the ideas of collaborative design in the context of structural engineering. The VWT allows users to edit structural designs, compile designs into usable models for simulation, perform wind simulations, evaluate the results, and then share and discuss their work with other users. The VWT has been used as a platform for projects ranging from small classroom activities to large scale crowdsourcing studies.

Abstract-We introduce a web-based system for management of Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) simulations. This system provides an interface for users, on a web-browser, to have an intuitive, user-friendly means of dispatching and controlling long-running simulations. CFD presents a challenge to its users due to the complexity of its internal mathematics, the high computational demands of its simulations and the complexity of inputs to its simulations and related tasks. We designed this system to be as extensible as possible in order to be suitable for many different civil engineering applications. The front-end of this system is a webserver, which provides the user interface. The back-end is responsible for starting and stopping jobs as requested. There are also numerous components specifically for facilitating CFD computation. We discuss our experience with presenting this system to real users and the future ambitions for this project.