Scientific computing applications usually need huge amounts of computational power. The cloud provides interesting high-performance computing solutions, with its promise of virtually infinite resources. However, migrating scientific computing problems to clouds and the re-creation of a software environment on the vendor-supplied OS and cloud instances is often a laborious task. It is also assumed that the scientist who is performing the experiments has significant knowledge of computer science, cloud computing and the migration procedure. Most often, this is not the case. Considering this obstacle, we have designed tools that help scientists to migrate their applications to the cloud. The idea is to migrate the complete desktop environment, with which the scientist is working daily, to the cloud directly. The developed desktop-to-cloud-migration (D2CM) tool supports transformation of virtual machine images, deployment description and life-cycle management for applications to be hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) or compatible infrastructure such as Eucalyptus. We used an electrochemical case study which extensively used the tool in drawing domain specific results. From the analysis, it was observed that D2CM tool not only helps in the migration process but also helps in optimizing the experiments, clusters and thus the costs for conducting scientific computing experiments on the cloud.
This work is done in the context of the EU FP7 project REMICS – “Reuse and Migration of legacy applications to Interoperable Cloud Services”
Software and guides
Source code is available at: https://bitbucket.org/mobilecloudlab/d2cm
User guide: http://mc.cs.ut.ee/mcsite/projects/d2cm-user-guide-v1.0/at_download/file
People
- Satish Srirama
- Chris Willmore
- Pelle Jakovits
- David Rodas
- Vladislav Ivaništšev, Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, University of Strathclyde, UK.
- Enn Lust, Faculty of Science and Technology, Institute of Chemistry, University of Tartu.
Publications
- S. N. Srirama, V. Ivanistsev, P. Jakovits, C. Willmore: Direct Migration of Scientific Computing Experiments to the Cloud, The 2013 (11th) International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2013), July 01-05, 2013, pp. 27-34. IEEE. (Nominee for the Outstanding Paper Award)
- S. N. Srirama, C. Willmore, V. Ivanistsev, P. Jakovits et al.: Desktop to Cloud Migration of Scientific Experiments, 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Computing and Scientific Applications (CCSA) @ 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid 2012), May 13-16, 2012. (* No proceedings) Slides