Direct migration of scientific computing experiments to the cloud

Abstract

Scientific computing applications usually need huge amounts of computational power. The cloud provides interesting high-performance computing solutions, with its promise of virtually infinite resources. However, migrating scientific computing problems to clouds and the re-creation of a software environment on the vendor-supplied OS and cloud instances is often a laborious task. It is also assumed that the scientist who is performing the experiments has significant knowledge of computer science, cloud computing and the migration procedure. Most often, this is not the case. Considering this obstacle, we have designed a tool that helps scientists to migrate their applications to the cloud. The idea is to migrate the complete software environment, in which the scientists have set up their experiments, directly to the cloud. The developed desktop-to-cloud-migration (D2CM) tool supports transformation and migration of virtual machine images, deployment description and life-cycle management for applications to be hosted on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) or compatible infrastructure such as Eucalyptus. The paper also presents an electrochemical case study which extensively used the tool in drawing domain specific results. From the analysis, it was observed that D2CM tool not only helps in the migration process and simplifying the work of the scientist, but also helps in optimizing the calculations, compute clusters and thus the costs for conducting scientific computing experiments on the cloud. © 2013 IEEE.