London: Computer scientists have made a working model of multi-million pound cloud computing technology using just Lego bricks and a handful of £20 mini-computers.

The University of Glasgow's Raspberry Pi Cloudproject links together 56 Raspberry Pi computer boards in racks made from Lego, which mimic the function and modular design of commercial cloud computing infrastructure.

In recent years, cloud computing has become increasingly popular, with major corporations such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft making huge investments to provide software and hardware resources to business and home computer users over the internet.

However, cloud computing service providers maintain a great deal of secrecy over how their systems work beyond the software available to end-users, making it difficult for computer science researchers and students to develop practical understanding of cloud infrastructure.

Dr Dimitrios Pezaros, Dr Jeremy Singer, Dr Posco Tso and Dr David White of the University's School of Computing Science developed the Raspberry Pi Cloud project to broaden access to cloud computing research and education.

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