2015 Press Releases

Cloud computing: ‘Everyone could be an entrepreneur’

21 Oct 2015
Professor John Morrison: The CloudLightning model will enable small businesses with little, or no, technical knowledge to create and provide new services to customers using the computing power of the cloud.

Everyone will have the potential to create the next Facebook with the cloud infrastructure of tomorrow, according to the UCC professor leading the CloudLightning project.

“The cloud infrastructure of today gives simultaneous access to data from any device and from any place - in a sense, everything is everywhere. The cloud infrastructure of tomorrow will give everyone the power to use that data to create new and innovative tools and businesses - in a sense, everyone could be an entrepreneur,” said Professor John Morrison, Department of Computer Science, UCC, and co-founder of the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics.

The cloud computing revolution is pervasive and yet, for many, imperceptible. We have all become used to reading emails on many devices, posting updates to friends on social media and taking pictures on the go. Regardless of what device we pick up, we expect it all to be there and for us to be able continue from where we left off.

The CloudLightning model will enable small businesses with little, or no, technical knowledge to create and provide new and innovative services to customers using the computing power of the cloud, he said. “We’re trying to make that process easy by creating a system that will automatically do the technical work for delivering the required services.”

The EU-funded project, set to run until January 2018, will result in companies focused on oil and gas exploration, genomics and other sectors using ray tracing to achieve a competitive advantage with faster computational resources.

Professor Morrison’s project, which has modern day applications to the work of George Boole and was selected by the European Commission over dozens of competing submissions, will develop an intelligent, power-efficient cloud computing infrastructure and offer consumers easier access to high performance resources.

The United Nations recognised the “bicentenary of the birth of George Boole, whose work on the application of the principles of logic as a form of algebra underpins all modern computer science” earlier this year in its resolution carried at a plenary session of the General Assembly in New York, designating October 20 as World Statistics Day, themed ‘Better Data, Better Lives.’

“Boole made a fundamental contribution that has, over time, evolved into the digital age,” commented Professor Morrison. “While much of his work has been exploited at this point, it continues to be the basis of our technology to date. As long as we have digital computers based on transistors, Boole’s contribution will always be there.”

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