With Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley (11th Cloud Expo) due to open in two weeks' time at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, let's introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the West Coast conference...

We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing & Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud and/or Big Data solutions that are transforming the world of Enterprise IT?

CLOUD EXPO SPEAKER NAME: Rich Wolski

TWITTER: @RichWolski

COMPANY: Eucalyptus Systems

11TH CLOUD EXPO SESSION TITLE: The Five Steps to Deploying a Private Cloud

SESSION DESCRIPTION: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2361109

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Rich Wolski is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems Inc., and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

Having received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Davis (while a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) he has also held positions at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Tennessee. He is currently also a strategic advisor to the San Diego Supercomputer Center and an adjunct faculty member at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Wolski has led several national scale research efforts in the area of high-performance distributed computing and grid computing, is the author of numerous research articles concerning the empirical study of distributed systems, and is the progenitor of the Eucalyptus project.

BLOGS: Eucalyptus Systems Blog. Occasional contributor to the Coresite Cloud Community. 

RECENT CLOUD COMPUTING QUOTE:

"The high-level vision for cloud computing is that it “flattens” the computational and storage abstractions in a way analogous to the way in which the Internet network protocols 'flatten' the network....

Cloud Computing is the programmatic provisioning of services to a user community whose requests are scaling dynamically through a transactional and asynchronous network-facing interface.

This definition reflects the state of play in terms of cloud computing systems today from an operational perspective. To begin with, clouds provide services to users in a way that can be accessed through applications or software user tools. Thus the model is immediately a service model in which users appeal to a service venue for computational service. At the same time, clouds are designed (for cost reasons) to support simultaneous user communities that fluctuate in size dynamically. The user experience is also transactional in that access is through a set of discrete requests, each of which is either accepted or refused. It is asynchronous for reasons of scale. Each request is accepted or rejected transactionally, but the result of an accepted request may be realized at a point in time (hopefully as soon as possible) after the transaction. Finally, the interface is network-facing, meaning that the service venue interacts with users via requests and responses across a network."

[Via the Eucalyptus company blog]