CloudDeck: A Layered Solution to Providing Cloud Analytics

The Warfighter has access to ever-increasing amounts and types of net-centric information. His tools for data storage and access, analysis, and decision-making are in a constant state of flux as they are improved or replaced. Cloud computing addresses the situation by hosting the applications and the data in a virtualized accumulation of computing resources (or cloud) and providing access via a web-based interface. This paradigm has met with success in the office problem domain for the commercial industry. CloudDeck strives to bring the cloud concept to the military tactical operations realm by assembling a toolset of analysis services and by integrating these services in a workflow. The CloudDeck''s five layers represent the different facets of the problem: the first two layers are well-known cloud computing system foundations but the other three address new research in analytics services, workflow, and user interface issues that are heart of this approach. Software agents will provide mission-based decision support for helpful insights into the workflow and analytic issues, and visual workflow representations and visual thinking techniques will illuminate the user interface research. The CloudDeck design is anticipated to easily scale from laboratory-based testbeds to large-scale server farm-based frameworks, with rapid fielding to the warfighter.