By offering computing as a utility at a high economy of scale, cloud computing has great potential to reshape the landscape of the IT industry. Following a service-oriented paradigm, cloud computing enables customers to build scalable software services hosted on large-scale data centers while allowing these services to be accessed through a variety of computing devices over the Internet. As cloud computing technologies have been maturing, enterprises are increasingly adopting this new computing paradigm to solve important business problems. Indeed, Gartner Inc. has identified cloud computing as one of the Top 10 strategic technologies for 2012.

And yet cloud computing continues to face deep technical challenges. These challenges are multifaceted and span almost the entire spectrum of computer science. On the service-hosting side, extremely large-scale data centers must offer secure, highly available services while maintain energy and performance efficiency. This continues to spur innovation in hardware architecture and systems software design. On the service-delivering side, service discovery and delivery mechanisms must support thousands of globally distributed client devices with highly diverse hardware and software configurations. Although this concern is partially addressed by web services in the traditional service-oriented computing environments, cloud computing environments require that the design and architecture of existing web services be revisited.

In light of these technological trends, this special issue will focus on fundamental research problems in cloud computing technologies, including novel studies underlining the challenges and opportunities presented to web services in the cloud computing era.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Cloud architecture, systems, middleware, and tools
Cloud quality and administration
Resource provision and management on cloud platforms
Mobile systems and pervasive computing
Security and privacy for cloud computing
Parallel and distributed computing on the clouds
Domain-specific clouds
Design, implementation and performance evaluation for cloud applications
Web technologies
Web services supporting cloud computing
Service-oriented computing
Service-oriented architecture
Models, methodologies and tools for web services
Publishing, discovery and selection for web services
Validation and testing for web services
Web Service applications

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 01 September, 2012 (Extended)
Acceptance notification: 01 November, 2012
Final paper due: 01 December, 2012

All papers must be submitted online. To submit a paper, please go to Online Submissions of Papers. If you experience any problems submitting your paper online, please contact submissions@inderscience.com, describing the exact problem you experience. (Please include in your email the title of the Special Issue, the title of the Journal and the names of the Guest Editors)