Google App Engine (GAE)

These days, I am working on a very interesting project, a part of which is about using cloud computing for information processing needs.
Cloud Computing [1] is about using an array of machines that process a job distributively. Though this sounds similar to distributive computing, it is not. In cloud computing, the jobs are divided into array of clusters, each one is carried out at a single machine and then results are mapped back into one result.

For cloud computing, our research group is planning to use either Google App Engine (Big Table) [2] or Amazon EC2 [3].

At present we are exploring which option is the best – so we are doing some sort of benchmarking using test data. we have RDF data file around 100 MB, which we want to be processed.

Google App Engine has some restrictions on the java classes that we can use. We are using Jena[4] to read RDF files, but Jena internally uses UI class which GAE doesn’t support. I am struggling to find a work around so that Jena can be used with GAE.

I will post more, the complete source code and benchmark results, once I solve all the problems.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
[2] http://code.google.com/appengine/
[3] aws.amazon.com/ec2
[4] jena.sourceforge.net/