Cloud computing promises to offer great opportunities for research groups; however when researchers want to execute applications in cloud infrastructures many complex processes must be accomplished. In this presentation we present the e-Clouds project which will allow researchers to easily execute many applications on public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions. Designed for being a Software as a Service (SaaS) marketplace for scientific applications, e-Clouds allows researchers to submit jobs which are transparently executed on public IaaS platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). e-Clouds manages the on-demand provisioning and configuration of computing instances, storage, applications, schedulers, jobs, and data. The architectural design and how a first application has been supported on e-Clouds are presented. e-Clouds will allow researchers to easily share and execute applications in the cloud at low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and without the complexities associated with details of IT configurations and management. e-Clouds provides new opportunities for research groups with low or none budget for dedicated cluster or grid solutions, providing on-demand access to ready-to-use applications and accelerating the result generation of e-Science projects.

1. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
e-Clouds: A SaaS Marketplace for Scientific Computing
Mario Villamizar, Harold Castro, David Mendez
Department of Systems and Computing Engineering
Universidad de los Andes
Bogotá, Colombia

2. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
THE PROBLEM
RELATED WORK
SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS
SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE
IMPLEMENTATION
FUTURE WORK

3. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
THE PROBLEM
When Small and Medium research groups have projects that requires large
processing capabilities they regularly have to use dedicated cluster and/or
grid computing infrastructures. However …

4. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
THE PROBLEM
1) The total cost of ownership
(TCO).
2) Complex processes related to IT
management.
3) There are different models to
parallelize applications.
4) Researchers require large
computing capabilities during
peak periods.

5. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
THE PROBLEM
Research groups of different sizes are adopting IaaS solutions.
The adoption of cloud computing is a complex process, where non-IT
researchers have to face similar or more complex processes as those found in
cluster or grid infrastructures.

6. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
THE PROBLEM
At enterprise level, the Software as a Service (SaaS) model allows that small
businesses can easily adopt complex and ready-to-use applications.
Problems associated to the management and the configuration of the
underlying (PaaS, IaaS) infrastructure are abstracted.

7. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
RELATED WORK – e-Clouds GOAL
e-Clouds:
A SaaS marketplace of
We believe that cloud scientific applications,
computing may provide more where research groups can
opportunities for a large access to on-demand and
number of small and medium ready-to-use applications
research groups. via a Web Browser using a
pay-per-use model.

8. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
RELATED WORK
Some commercial scientific SaaS marketplaces such as Cyclone and Cloud
Numbers are offering scientific SaaS application on public IaaS.

9. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS
In most in-house HPC/HTC environments, clusters are the core element used
to execute scientific applications.

10. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS
Public Enterprise In-house Public Scientific
SaaS Platforms Cluster SaaS (e-Clouds)
End-user interfaces End-user interfaces End-user interfaces
Web Applications Batch Applications Batch Applications
Distributed File Cloud Storage
Data
Systems Systems
Runtime External Libraries External Libraries
Middleware Cluster middleware Cluster middleware
Operating Systems Operating Systems Operating Systems
Virtualization Virtualization Virtualization
Servers Servers Servers
Storage Storage Storage
Networking Networking Networking
A multi-tenant SaaS solution for scientific computing should allow, to each
researcher, to control the on-demand deployment of virtual servers, the
execution of jobs of preconfigured scientific applications, and the movement
of data from and to the cloud; we call these four elements the workspace.

11. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
SOLUTION REQUIREMENTS
Performance penalties when a common cluster is migrated to the cloud.
Scheduling
Blob Storage App Management/Installation

12. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE
Virtual cluster Application Data
management management management
Job execution
and Pricing Security
monitoring
e-Clouds should be based in a new architecture that abstract the above
problems, allowing researchers to focus their efforts in result analysis and
experimental designs, and not on technical IT issues.

13. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE
The job executions are transparent to
the user; the user only have to create
the VC, send the jobs, and download
the results using the WP.
e-Clouds is in charge of interacting with the public IaaS in all steps.

14. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE
The e-Clouds architecture for a SaaS
marketplace is mainly based in the fact
that servers, applications, jobs and user
data must be isolated and configured
on-demand.
Researchers (e-Clouds users) do not
have to pay anything if they do not use
e-Clouds and they can execute jobs of
scientific applications without spending
time in complex IT tasks.
Operational costs of the e-Clouds
Web Portal, e-Clouds Resource
Manager and e-Clouds Database are
assumed by the e-Clouds team.

15. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
IMPLEMENTATION
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
J2EE (Glassfish container)
The RM was developed as a
Java background process.
MySQL
EC2, S3
e-Clouds Agent (J2SE)
BLAST application

16. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
EXPERIMENTAL TESTS – EXECUTION TIMES
Average
Concurrent Network Storage Used in
Instance Type Execution
Jobs Use (GB) S3 (GB)
Time (Hours)
1 Small 0.226 0.226 3.90
5 Small 1.130 1.130 4.57
10 Small 2.260 2.260 3.98
1 Medium 0.226 0.226 2.50
5 Medium 1.130 1.130 1.99
10 Medium 2.260 2.260 2.05
BLAST with two input files: Database (226MB) y Query File (1MB)
Small (1 EC2 Unit, 1.7 GB RAM) and medium (2 EC2 Units, 3.75 GB RAM)

17. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
EXPERIMENTAL TESTS – COSTS
Storage Total
Concurrent Instance Networking Processing
Cost Cost
Jobs Type Cost (USD) Cost (USD)
(USD) (USD)
1 Small 0,125 0 0,32 0,445
5 Small 0,625 0 1,92 2,545
10 Small 1,250 0 3,60 4,850
1 Medium 0,125 0 0,48 0,605
5 Medium 0,625 0 2,00 2,625
10 Medium 1,250 0 4,16 5,410
More tests need to be performed.

18. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
IMPLEMENTATION
The first tests with NCBI BLAST executed on e-Clouds show that through e-
Clouds researchers can focus their efforts analyzing and designing the
computational simulations.

19. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
IMPLEMENTATION
e-Clouds allows that virtual servers, (BoT) applications, data, and jobs can be
easily managed by e-Clouds admins and researchers. The first implementation
shows that e-Clouds may be easily extended to include new applications and
research groups, which should be reflected in new research results.

20. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
FUTURE WORK
Usability tests with more research
groups (at least 5).
Large scale performance tests.
Auto scaling and queues mechanisms.
More Bag of Tasks applications.
e-Clouds as an Open Source project.
Shared workspaces.
Different public IaaS.
Types of applications (MPI, GPUs).
Stronger security mechanisms.

21. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION!

22. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
CONTACT INFORMATION
mj.villamizar24@uniandes.edu.co mjvc007@hotmail.com
@mariocloud
http://linkedin.com/in/mariojosevillamizarcano
Mario José Villamizar Cano

23. UCC2012: IEEE/ACM Fifth International Conference on Utility and
Cloud Computing, Chicago - USA
MAGELLAN REPORT (DEC 2011)
Cases where Private and Commercial Clouds may be Cost Effective (Magellan R.):
Unknown Demand. In the case of a new project or a new application area where
the potential demand is still poorly understood.
Sporadic Demand. One of the more common cases for using commercial cloud
offerings is when the demand is highly variable, especially if there are also time
sensitive requirements for the service.
Facility Constrained. Some sites are severely infrastructure limited.