Cloud computing platforms have gained significant popularity in the past several years, especially among small businesses who view cloud services a flexible, powerful, convenient, and cost-effective alternative to owning and managing their own computing infrastructure. The emergence of cloud services brings new possibilities for constructing and using HPC platforms. However, while cloud services provide the flexibility and convenience of customized, pay-as-you-go parallel computing, multiple previous studies in the past three years have indicated that cloud based clusters need a significant performance boost to become a competitive choice, especially for tightly coupled parallel applications.