Making time-stepped applications tick in the cloud
Tao Zou, Guozhang Wang, Marcos António Vaz Salles, David Bindel, Alan J. Demers, Johannes E. Gehrke, Walker M. White · 2011
Scientists are currently evaluating the cloud as a new platform. Many important scientific applications, however, perform poorly in the cloud. These applications proceed in highly parallel discrete time-steps or "ticks," using logical synchronization barriers at tick boundaries. We observe that network jitter in the cloud can severely increase the time required for communication in these applications, significantly increasing overall running time.