Kepler + CometCloud: Dynamic Scientific Workflow Execution on Federated Cloud Resources

The widespread availability and variety of cloud offerings and their associated access models has drastically grown over the past few years. It is now common for users to have access to multiple infrastructures (e.g., campus clusters, cloud resources), however, deploying complex application workflows on top of these resources remains a challenge. In this paper we propose an approach that allows users to build and run scientific workflows on top of a federation of multiple clouds and traditional resources (e.g., clusters). We achieve this by integrating the Kepler scientific workflow platform with the CometCloud framework. This allows us to: 1) dynamically and programmatically provision and aggregate resources, 2) easily compose complex workflows, and 3) dynamically schedule and execute these workflows based on provenance and overall objectives on the resulting federation of resources. We demonstrate our approach and evaluate its capabilities by running a bioinformatics workflow on top of a federation composed of a campus cluster and two clouds.