Performance evaluation of USP's cloud platform and its comparison with Amazon EC2

In a cloud environment, virtualization enables efficient allocation of shared set of physical resources to a large user base with different needs. This has potentially allowed clouds to deliver to its customers the benefits associated with an economy of scale. On the other hand, virtualization can introduce performance penalties as well. In this paper we present the performance of the Eucalyptus cloud computing services at the School of Computing, Information, and Mathematical Science (SCIMS), University of the South Pacific (USP). Four benchmarking suites have been used to comprehensively evaluate the Eucalyptus cloud performance across single instance and cluster of nodes. The result obtained is compared with the performance of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). As expected the SCIMS cloud performance is on average two folds lower than Amazon Web Services. However this is a respectable margin given the disparity in the hardware infrastructure.