| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 425820 | Future Generation Computer Systems | 2016 | 13 Pages |
•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.
