Component Approach to Computational Applications on Clouds

Running computational science applications on the emerging cloud infrastructures requires appropriate programming models and tools. In this paper we investigate the applicability of the component model to developing such applications. The component model we propose takes advantages of the features of the IaaS infrastructure and offers a high-level application composition API. We describe experiments on a scientific application from the bioinformatics domain, using a hybrid cloud infrastructure which consists of a private cloud running Eucalyptus and the Amazon EC2 public cloud. The measured performance of virtual machine startup time and virtualization overhead indicate promising prospects for exploiting such infrastructures along with the proposed component-based approach.