I'm trying to learn cloud-computing, especially the idea of distributed operations (Grid Computing?) for a project I'm working on. We'll need to perform distributed fault-tolerant operations over a very large data set, which we will also be responsible for storing and maintaining in an optimized way.
If I'm trying to learn from books or white-papers, what types of things should I look out for and focus on to help me gain this knowledge as efficiently and effectively as possible?
This may be noteworthy, I hesitate to say it's a place to start though and should definitely be accompanied by material that isn't so whitepaper-ey. It's very dry. http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/labs.google.com/en//papers/bigtable-osdi06.pdf
I really like this book: Beautiful Architecture: Leading Thinkers Reveal the Hidden Beauty in Software Design
It probably isn't completely related to the concepts that you have listed (it is more higher level). I still believe that there are some related examples and presented in an approachable manner.
