Cloud Computing for Parameter Sweep Experiments

ELINA PACINI; MELISA RIBERO; CRISTIAN MATEOS; ANÍBAL MIRASSO; CARLOS GARCÍA GARINO

New Horizons in Creative Open Software, Multimedia, Human Factors and Software Engineering

Blue Herons

Lugar: Bergamo; Año: 2012; p. 100 - 118

Nowadays, scientists and engineers are more and more faced to the need  of computational power to satisfy the ever-increasing resource intensive nature of their experiments. Traditionally, to cope with this, users have  relied on conventional computing infrastructures such as clusters and  Grids. A recent computing paradigm that is gaining momentum is Cloud  Computing, which offers a simpler administration mechanism compared  to those conventional infrastructures. However, there is a lack of studies  in the literature about the viability of using Cloud Computing to execute  scientific and engineering applications from a performance standpoint.  We present an empirical study on the employment of Cloud  infrastructures to run parameter sweep experiments (PSEs), particularly  studies of viscoplastic solids together with simulations by using the  CloudSim toolkit. In general, we obtained very good speedups, which suggest that disciplinary users could benefit from Cloud Computing for executing resource intensive PSEs.