cloud computing for digital libraries

With the ever-increasing volumes of research documents produced over the years, in the form of electronic thesis and dissertations, the existing information management systems cannot sacle well and hence dynamic scalability of cloud computing can be taken advantage off to offer this service. This research thus, aims to develop techniques for building scalable digital information management systems based on efficient and on-demand use of generic grid-based technologies. In particular, existing resources like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon SimpleDB were used in this study.



Specifically, this study addresses the following questions:

1. Can a typical DL architecture be layered over an on-demand paradigm such as Amazons EC2/S3?
2. Is there linear scalability with increasing data and service capacity needs?

This study commenced with familiarization with Amazons EC2, S3 and SQS and the ways in which EC2 instances can be used to provide computational power needed together with S3 in order to facilitate storage of data. Initial experimentation did prove that Amazons EC2/S3 were suitable for providing the required computational power and storage service respectively. This is because the services are tailored specifically to fulfil design requirements such as scalability, reliability, speed, cost and simplicity. However, further functionalities provided by Amazon Web Services are yet to be explored.

Development of a protype digital library system to make use of the above-mentioned Amazon web services will be done to validate the study. This was done iteratively and tested at every stage to check for conformance with the design specifications. Most importantly, the developed prototype system will be evaluated on how well it can handle increasing volumes of information. The prototype digital library system comprises a simple user interface which makes experimentation easier for the evaluation phase. Finally, the system will be tested for effciency in handling simultaneous requests and responding in a timely manner.