Measured characteristics of distributed cloud computing infrastructure for message-based collaboration applications

While the emerging cloud computing systems promise infrastructure resources to support application scalability, there are publications of systematic evaluation of this emerging information technology infrastructure in general, and no obvious publications for some representative collaboration applications in particular. We describe a methodology to study the characteristics of distributed cloud computing infrastructure for message-based collaboration applications. We report our findings of distributed cloud infrastructures in a multitude of dimensions, including performance, scalability and reliability at the network level using standard network performance tools for easy comparison of results with large quantity of literature on classic, non-cloud environments; at the message level using the NaradaBrokering system [1] by the Indiana University Community Grids Laboratory which supports a large number of practical communication protocols; and at the collaboration and communication applications level using the Anabas Impromptu, a message-based Web Conferencing system for synchronous, multipoint data collaboration, Voice-over IP communication, and Videoover IP conferencing traffics.