Research Article
A Performance Analysis of EC2 Cloud Computing Services for Scientific Computing
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-12636-9_9, author={Simon Ostermann and Alexandria Iosup and Nezih Yigitbasi and Radu Prodan and Thomas Fahringer and Dick Epema}, title={A Performance Analysis of EC2 Cloud Computing Services for Scientific Computing}, proceedings={Cloud Computing. First International Conference, CloudComp 2009 Munich, Germany, October 19--21, 2009 Revised Selected Papers}, proceedings_a={CLOUDCOMP}, year={2012}, month={5}, keywords={}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-12636-9_9} }- Simon Ostermann
Alexandria Iosup
Nezih Yigitbasi
Radu Prodan
Thomas Fahringer
Dick Epema
Year: 2012
A Performance Analysis of EC2 Cloud Computing Services for Scientific Computing
CLOUDCOMP
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-12636-9_9
Abstract
Cloud Computing is emerging today as a commercial infrastructure that eliminates the need for maintaining expensive computing hardware. Through the use of virtualization, clouds promise to address with the same shared set of physical resources a large user base with different needs. Thus, clouds promise to be for scientists an alternative to clusters, grids, and supercomputers. However, virtualization may induce significant performance penalties for the demanding scientific computing workloads. In this work we present an evaluation of the usefulness of the current cloud computing services for scientific computing. We analyze the performance of the Amazon EC2 platform using micro-benchmarks and kernels. While clouds are still changing, our results indicate that the current cloud services need an order of magnitude in performance improvement to be useful to the scientific community.