On the Use of Cloud Computing for Scientific Workflows

This paper explores the use of cloud computing for scientific workflows, focusing on a widely used astronomy application-Montage. The approach is to evaluate from the point of view of a scientific workflow the tradeoffs between running in a local environment, if such is available, and running in a virtual environment via remote, wide-area network resource access. The results show that for Montage, a workflow with short job runtimes, the virtual environment can provide good compute time performance but it can suffer from resource scheduling delays and wide-area communications.