The 2011 Service Cup is the sixth episode of the series of contest. The contest opens to talented students (Students Group) and industry practitioners (Professionals Group). The contest focuses on using the SOA methodologies, solution reference architectures, and tools to solve real world problems. We choose a different theme each year, while the real world application is chosen by the participants. In 2011, we decide to have two themes - cloud computing and SOA. The two themes are interlinked. The teams can choose to build their application as a classic SOA system, or can explore the new potentials of Clouds.

The Service Cup aims to apply SOA and cloud computing in solving real world problems, and promote education of related techniques at undergraduate and graduate level. In the past, our participants studied a wide range of problems, from business intelligence to social software, from algorithms to developing software engineering toolkits.

New from this year, we are going to offer free hosting service to the participation teams, thanks to Prof. Qianxiang Wang and his team from Peking University (China). The Peking University's online platform can offer Web hosting service and virtual machine service. The platform also has safe guard mechanism to monitor the hosted systems. If the teams want to use the hosting service, please contact us.

The finalists will be invited to ICWS 2011 in USA for on-site contest. The papers of the finalists will be published in the proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Congress on Services (SERVICES 2011) which is collected in IEEE Digital Library. IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Services Computing sponsors travel awards to the top teams in final list.

Some Inspiring Works in Cloud Computing