Cloud computing is a powerful new technology that is widely used in the business world. Recently, we have been investigating the benefits it offers to scientific computing. We have used three workflow applications to compare the performance of processing data on the Amazon EC2 cloud with the performance on the Abe high-performance cluster at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). We show that the Amazon EC2 cloud offers better performance and value for processor-and memory-limited applications than for I/O-bound applications. We provide an example of how the cloud is well suited to the generation of a science product: an atlas of periodograms for the 210,000 light curves released by the NASA Kepler Mission. This atlas will support the identification of periodic signals, including those due to transiting exoplanets, in the Kepler data sets.
Berriman et al. studied the cost effectiveness of scientific computing applications in Amazon's EC2 REF through a comparison between Amazon's EC2 and the Abe high-performance cluster at the National Center for Super Computing in the US.
The Application of Cloud Computing to Astronomy: A Study of Cost and Performance
2010 Sixth IEEE International Conference on e-Science Workshops
2010 Sixth IEEE International Conference on e-Science Workshops
Physics Computer Science