Investigating Business-Driven Cloudburst Schedulers for E-Science Bag-of-Tasks Applications

The new ways of doing science, rooted on the unprecedented processing, communication and storage infrastructures that became available to scientists, are collectively called e-Science. Many research labs now need non-trivial computational power to run e-Science applications. Grid and voluntary computing are well-established solutions that cater to this need, but are not accessible for all labs and institutions. Besides, there is an uncertainty about the future amount of resources that will be available in such infrastructures, which prevents the researchers from planning their activities to guarantee that deadlines will be met. With the emergence of the cloud computing paradigm come new opportunities. One possibility is to run e-Science activities at resources acquired on-demand from cloud providers. However, although very low, there is a cost associated with the usage of cloud resources. Besides that, the amount of resources that can be simultaneously acquired is, in practice, limited. Another possibility is the not new idea of composing hybrid infrastructures in which the huge amount of computational resources shared by the grid infrastructures are used whenever possible and extra capacity is acquired from cloud computing providers. We here investigate how to schedule e-Science activities in such hybrid infrastructures so that deadlines are met and costs are reduced.