Self-managed cost-efficient virtual elastic clusters on hybrid Cloud infrastructures

• Cost-efficient hybrid elastic virtual clusters are deployed across clouds.
• Spot instances and checkpointing reduce the costs of execution.
• Hybrid clusters reduce the total execution time by employing cloud bursting.
• Computationally intensive applications are executed easily with EC3.

In this study, we describe the ​further development of Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster (EC3), a tool ​for creating self-managed cost-efficient virtual hybrid elastic clusters on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. By using spot ​instances and checkpointing techniques, EC3 can significantly reduce the total ​execution cost as well as facilitating automatic fault tolerance. Moreover, EC3 can deploy and manage hybrid clusters across on-premises and public ​cloud resources, thereby introducing ​cloud bursting capabilities. ​We present the results of a case study that we conducted to assess the effectiveness of the tool ​based on the structural dynamic analysis of buildings. In addition, we evaluated the checkpointing algorithms in a real ​cloud environment with existing workloads to study their effectiveness. The results ​demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this type of ​cluster for computationally intensive applications.