Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Cloud computing is a crucial driving force towards the information age. It has made the software and hardware connected to our networks available to people and industry with lower costs and better quality of service. Furthermore, because clouds share resources among users, which is referred to as multitenancy, they better utilize the infrastructure. This saves energy and materials, making cloud computing a green and sustainable technology. All these are critical; the alternative to cloud computing is buying, managing and maintaining large computer networks and their necessary infrastructure on premises, which entails a cost either beyond the capabilities of most small and medium sized Canadian companies or eventually transferrable to their customers, making them less competitive against international counterparts.At the software level, new technologies, such as Node.js, have been invented to exploit the distributed characteristics of the cloud. However, being new, they lack the maturity of more established technologies, and more importantly are incomplete in terms of utilizing the underlying hardware and developer-friendliness. We have completed preliminary research in this area through various innovations at the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) level of cloud computing using Java, including improving scalability, higher parallelization/threading support and hardware utilization. Based on these, we will investigate improving Node.js for cloud computing with scientific discipline particularly in the areas of scalability, cloud deployment, live-development support, hardware utilization and new language features.