MapReduce in the Clouds for Science

Abstract — The utility computing model introduced by cloud computing combined with the rich set of cloud infrastructure services offers a very viable alternative to traditional servers and computing clusters. MapReduce distributed data processing architecture has become the weapon of choice for data-intensive analyses in the clouds and in commodity clusters due to its excellent fault tolerance features, scalability and the ease of use. Currently, there are several options for using MapReduce in cloud environments, such as using MapReduce as a service, setting up one’s own MapReduce cluster on cloud instances, or using specialized cloud MapReduce runtimes that take advantage of cloud infrastructure services. In this paper, we introduce AzureMapReduce, a novel MapReduce runtime built using the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure services. AzureMapReduce architecture successfully leverages the high latency, eventually consistent, yet highly scalable Azure infrastructure services to provide an efficient, on demand alternative to traditional MapReduce clusters. Further we evaluate the use and performance of MapReduce frameworks, including AzureMapReduce, in cloud environments for scientific applications using sequence assembly and sequence alignment as use cases

High-Performance Cloud Computing: A View of Scientific Applications

Scientific computing often requires the availability of a massive number of computers for performing large scale experiments. Traditionally, these needs have been addressed by using high-performance computing solutions and installed facilities such as clusters and super computers, which are difficult to setup, maintain, and operate. Cloud computing provides scientists with a completely new model of utilizing the computing infrastructure. Compute resources, storage resources, as well as applications, can be dynamically provisioned (and integrated within the existing infrastructure) on a pay per use basis. These resources can be released when they are no more needed. Such services are often offered within the context of a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which ensure the desired Quality of Service (QoS). Aneka, an enterprise Cloud computing solution, harnesses the power of compute resources by relying on private and public Clouds and delivers to users the desired QoS. Its flexible and service based infrastructure supports multiple programming paradigms that make Aneka address a variety of different scenarios: from finance applications to computational science. As examples of scientific computing in the Cloud, we present a preliminary case study on using Aneka for the classification of gene expression data and the execution of fMRI brain imaging workflow.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, conference pape