Managing Usability and Reliability Aspects in Cloud Computing

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal model and open-source platform for cloud computing that simplifies conducting large-scale scientific experiments, focusing on usability and reliability for domain experts in biophysics and chemistry.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly, formal cloud platform model and implementation that enables scientists to perform complex experiments without deep technical cloud knowledge.

Findings

Significant time savings in data processing and computation.

Enhanced usability for domain experts.

Successful application in biophysics and chemistry experiments.

Abstract

Cloud computing provides a great opportunity for scientists, as it enables large-scale experiments that cannot are too long to run on local desktop machines. Cloud-based computations can be highly parallel, long running and data-intensive, which is desirable for many kinds of scientific experiments. However, to unlock this power, we need a user-friendly interface and an easy-to-use methodology for conducting these experiments. For this reason, we introduce here a formal model of a cloud-based platform and the corresponding open-source implementation. The proposed solution allows to conduct experiments without having a deep technical understanding of cloud-computing, HPC, fault tolerance, or data management in order to leverage the benefits of cloud computing. In the current version, we have focused on biophysics and structural chemistry experiments, based on the analysis of big data from synchrotrons and atomic force microscopy. The domain experts noted the time savings for computing and data management, as well as user-friendly interface.