Congratulations to Gary McGilvary on his PhD

We should all congratulate Gary on completing his corrections and on managing remote production of his thesis, "Ad hoc Cloud Computing", while in California, interning at Apple. It demonstrates the remarkable power of the Internet to arrange action at a distance! His thesis is now available here and should be read.

Gary's research, "Ad hoc Cloud Computing" is a much more remarkable and sustained demonstration showing how the unused power of an organisation's computers or altruistically offered computers can be harnessed effectively and made much more usable. He explored every step needed to make it easy to set up Volunteer Clouds, i.e., how to provide and manage a consistent and reliable Cloud running over unreliable, heterogeneous volunteer computers. He devised a technically elegant and practical approach to every stage, building on BOINC. He measured these carefully to demonstrate their power and efficiency.

But you don't want to hear about it from me, you should read his thesis, which I am glad to report is on this site, http://research.nesc.ac.uk/node/994. Please download it and have a good read; I enjoyed it every time I read it! His examiners primary concern was that more people should read and understand it, as they thought it was excellent research that should be widely applied.