With the rapid development of hardware and software virtualization technologies, the last few years have witnessed the rise of cloud computing, a new computing model that aims at providing resources to applications and services like public utilities such as water and electricity. Although cloud computing has already become a multi-billion dollar business, many key research challenges still exist, waiting for further and more advanced research. In this course we will read related papers and discuss the current trends and latest findings in this emerging area. The goal of this course is to acquire an in-depth understanding of the research issues in cloud computing including datacenter network design, resource and performance management, energy management, security, pricing as well as application frameworks such as MapReduce. We will also review related research topics including scheduling, network, server and storage virtualization.