A Performance Analysis of EC2 Cloud Computing Services for Scientific Computing
Simon Ostermann, Alexandru Iosup, Nezih Yigitbasi, Radu Prodan, Thomas Fahringer, Dick H. J. Epema · 2010
Abstract. Cloud Computing is emerging today as a commercial infrastructure that eliminates the need for maintaining expensive computing hardware. Through the use of virtualization, clouds promise to address with the same shared set of physical resources a large user base with different needs. Thus, clouds promise to be for scientists an alternative to clusters, grids, and supercomputers. However, virtualization may induce significant performance penalties for the demanding scientific computing workloads. In this work we present an evaluation of the usefulness of the current cloud computing services for scientific computing. We analyze the performance of the Amazon EC2 platform using micro-benchmarks and kernels.While clouds are still changing, our results indicate that the current cloud services need an order of magnitude in performance improvement to be useful to the scientific community. 1