Computation and Storage in the Cloud

Preface

Nowadays, scientific research increasingly relies on IT technologies, where large-scale and high-performance computing systems (e.g. clusters, grids and supercomputers) are utilised by the communities of researchers to carry out their applications. Scientific applications are usually computation and data-intensive, where complex computation tasks take a long time for execution and the generated data sets are often terabytes or petabytes in size. Storing valuable generated application data sets can save their regeneration cost when they are reused, not to mention the waiting time caused by regeneration. However, the large size of the scientific data sets makes their storage a big challenge.

In recent years, cloud computing is emerging ...