Managing Usability and Reliability Aspects in Cloud Computing
This work addresses usability and reliability issues in cloud computing for scientists, particularly in biophysics and structural chemistry, though it is incremental as it builds on existing cloud technologies.
The paper tackles the challenge of making cloud computing accessible for scientific experiments by introducing a formal model and open-source platform that simplifies conducting large-scale, data-intensive experiments without requiring deep technical expertise, resulting in noted time savings for computing and data management.
Cloud computing provides a great opportunity for scientists, as it enables large-scale experiments that cannot are too long to run on local desktop machines. Cloud-based computations can be highly parallel, long running and data-intensive, which is desirable for many kinds of scientific experiments. However, to unlock this power, we need a user-friendly interface and an easy-to-use methodology for conducting these experiments. For this reason, we introduce here a formal model of a cloud-based platform and the corresponding open-source implementation. The proposed solution allows to conduct experiments without having a deep technical understanding of cloud-computing, HPC, fault tolerance, or data management in order to leverage the benefits of cloud computing. In the current version, we have focused on biophysics and structural chemistry experiments, based on the analysis of big data from synchrotrons and atomic force microscopy. The domain experts noted the time savings for computing and data management, as well as user-friendly interface.