The first round of papers presented at the Usenix "HotCloud 2011" Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, held this week in Portland, Oregon, focused on exploring new approaches in scheduling workloads in the cloud that could benefit both cloud users and providers.

Researchers discussed how to define cloud compute jobs by the hardware they need, and how pricing could be made more flexible than today's static schedulers will allow.

Job scheduling, in which multiple compute jobs are balanced across a single compute node, is not a new issue in IT, but its importance is paramount in cloud computing.

"The physical resources to actually implement a cloud are incredibly expensive, and so, having built it, you want to pack in as much work as possible into that infrastructure. Hence scheduling becomes really important," said David Maltz, a Microsoft Research researcher, who helped organize the workshop.

How work should get scheduled in a cloud in an equitable manner, however, raises a whole new set of questions and challenges, the presenters pointed out.