The cost of doing science on the cloud: the Montage example

  • Authors:
  • Ewa Deelman;Gurmeet Singh;Miron Livny;Bruce Berriman;John Good

  • Affiliations:
  • USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA;USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA;University of Wisconsin Madison, Madison, WI;California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA;California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Utility grids such as the Amazon EC2 cloud and Amazon S3 offer computational and storage resources that can be used on-demand for a fee by compute and data-intensive applications. The cost of running an application on such a cloud depends on the compute, storage and communication resources it will provision and consume. Different execution plans of the same application may result in significantly different costs. Using the Amazon cloud fee structure and a real-life astronomy application, we study via simulation the cost performance tradeoffs of different execution and resource provisioning plans. We also study these trade-offs in the context of the storage and communication fees of Amazon S3 when used for long-term application data archival. Our results show that by provisioning the right amount of storage and compute resources, cost can be significantly reduced with no significant impact on application performance.