AMOS: Using the cloud for on-demand execution of e-Science applications

The amount of computing resources currently available on Clouds is large and easily available with pay per use cost model. E-Science applications that need on-demand execution benefit from Clouds, because no permanent computing resources to support peak demand has to be acquired. In this paper, we present AMOS, a system that automates creation and management of temporary Grids on a Cloud to execute (parts of) application workflows. We performed experiments with AMOS and a representative e-Science application on a research Grid and on the Amazon EC2 Cloud. The results show that AMOS is a viable approach to manage and execute e-Science applications in a flexible Grid environment and to explore novel mechanisms that allow optimal utilization of Cloud resources. Furthermore, we consider AMOS as a step towards an operating system for (virtual) infrastructures that enables Grid applications to control their computational resources at run-time. © 2010 IEEE