Image courtesy of Emerald Cloud Lab
The term “cloud lab” was first coined by Stephen Wolfram and Brian Frezza in 2012 to describe the lab being built by Emerald Therapeutics. The term came into public use in 2014, with the introduction of Emerald Cloud Lab.
“Cloud lab” as a technical term was intended to be analogous to the cloud computing paradigm in the IT world. The IT community also initially struggled to define what exactly is meant by the term “cloud computing” and how it was fundamentally different from other technologies of its day. Over time, a set of criteria evolved to distinguish cloud computing from prior, incomplete technologies such as local data centers or rentable shared access data centers.
[Check out Part 1 of this feature on what constitutes a true cloud laboratory.]
The same is true of the term “cloud lab,” which is defined by five criteria:
Remote, on-demand experimen…