A group of leading computer scientists from Parallel Computing Lab Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab) published a white paper Thursday (Feb. 12) that lays out a broad road map for cloud computing. They called for a standard application programming interface (API) to spark adoption among a broad set of providers and users.

Cloud computing lets users tap into the power of massive data centers to run their applications, a capability currently offered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a handful of other companies. The trend could “transform large parts of the IT industry,” said the group of eleven professors at the University of California at Berkeley who wrote the report.

The report called for cloud services to apply encryption and improve software tools for virtualization, debugging and code scaling to nurture the trend. In addition, it said computer makers need to do a better job of optimizing their hardware for today’s large data centers, and they should embrace solid state drives as part of the storage hierarchy.

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