Performance Analysis of the DInSAR P-SBAS Algorithm within AWS Cloud

Often scientific applications are characterized by complex workflows and large datasets to manage. Usually, these applications run in dedicated high performance computing centers with low-latency interconnections which require a consistent initial cost. Public and private cloud computing environments, thanks to their features such as customized computing environments, flexibility, and elasticity represent a valid alternative with respect to HPC clusters in order to minimize costs and optimize processing. In this paper the migration of an advanced Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) methodology for the investigation of Earth surface deformation phenomena to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing environment is presented. Such a technique which is referred to as Parallel Small Baseline Subset (P-SBAS) algorithm allows producing mean deformation velocity maps and the corresponding displacement time-series from a temporal sequence of radar images. Moreover, an experimental analysis aimed at evaluating the P-SBAS algorithm parallel performances which are achieved within the AWS cloud by exploiting two different families of instances and by taking into account different I/O and network bandwidth configurations is presented.