Cloud computing is a paradigm that allows flexible, dynamic and elastic provision of computational resources. It allows the improvement of a wide range of applications, specially those that benefit from high performance and throughput computing.  The cloud represents a solution when traditional physical infrastructures don’t provide enough computational power or aren’t feasible from an economical and/or organizational point of view. The present talk will introduce the basics of this technology and display real use cases of applications pertaining to emergent areas such as Bioinformatics and Space Exploration

Dr. Jose Luis Vazquez-Poletti is Assistant Professor in Computer Architecture at Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), and a Cloud Computing Researcher at the Distributed Systems Architecture Research Group (http://dsa-research.org/). He has been directly involved in EU funded projects, such as EGEE (Grid Computing) and 4CaaSt (PaaS Cloud), as well as many Spanish national initiatives.  From 2005 to 2009 his research focused in application porting onto Grid Computing infrastructures, activity that let him be "where the real action was". These applications pertained to a wide range of areas, from Fusion Physics to Bioinformatics. During this period he achieved the abilities needed for profiling applications and making them benefit of distributed computing infrastructures. Additionally, he shared these abilities in many training events organized within the EGEE Project and similar initiatives.  Since 2010 his research interests lie in different aspects of Cloud Computing, but always having real life applications in mind, specially those pertaining to the High Performance Computing domain.