Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms

Chapter 13. UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC APPLICATIONS FOR CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS

SHANTENU JHA, DANIEL S. KATZ, ANDRE LUCKOW, ANDRE MERZKY, and KATERINA STAMOU

INTRODUCTION

Distributed systems and their specific incarnations have evolved significantly over the years. Most often, these evolutionary steps have been a consequence of external technology trends, such as the significant increase in network/bandwidth capabilities that have occurred. It can be argued that the single most important driver for cloud computing environments is the advance in virtualization technology that has taken place. But what implications does this advance, leading to today's cloud environments, have for scientific applications? The aim of this chapter is to explore how clouds can support scientific applications.

Before we can address this important issue, it is imperative to (a) provide a working model and definition of clouds and (b) understand how they differ from other computational platforms such as grids and clusters. At a high level, cloud computing is defined by Mell and Grance [1] as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

We view clouds not as a monolithic isolated platform but as part of a large distributed ecosystem. But are clouds a natural evolution of distributed ...