Plug into the Supercloud

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IEEE Internet Computing Special Issue on Virtualization
Vol. 17, No. 2,
Abstract. Cloud computing is often compared to the power utility model as part of a trend towards the commoditization of computing resources. However, today’s cloud providers do not simply supply raw computing resources as a commodity, but also act as distributors, dictating cloud services that are not compatible across providers. We propose a new cloud service distribution layer, called a supercloud, that is completely decoupled from the cloud provider. Leveraging a nested paravirtualization layer called the Xen-Blanket, the supercloud maintains the control necessary to implement hypervisor-level services and management. Using the XenBlanket to transform various cloud provider services into a unified offering, we have deployed a supercloud across Amazon’s EC2, an enterprise cloud, and Cornell University, and performed live VM migration between the different sites. Furthermore, superclouds create opportunities to exploit resource management techniques that providers do not expose, like resource oversubscription, and ultimately can reduce costs for users.
Bibtex. 
@article{jamjoom-supercloud,
author = {Dan and Williams and Hani and Jamjoom and Hakim and Weatherspoon},
title = {{Plug into the Supercloud}},
journal = {IEEE Internet Computing Special Issue on Virtualization},
volume = {17},
number = {2},
month = {Mar/April},
year = {2013}
}