The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A has just published a special issue entitled: “e-Science – towards the cloud: infrastructures, applications and research.” The issue contains 12 papers that are considered “best in show” at the U. K. e-Science All Hands Meeting held in York, England, in September 2011.
I am particularly honored that my paper on “The application of cloud computing to scientific workflows: a study of cost and performance,” co-authored with Ewa Deelman, Gideon Juve, Mats Rynge and Jens-S. Vöckler, was chosen for inclusion as a review paper. This paper summarizes much of the work we have done on cloud computing in the past five years. The emphasis is on astronomy, and covers matters such as the cost of running different types of applications on the Amazon cloud, and the performance of different types of cloud in processing the time series data sets produced by the Kepler mission.
The papers in the Special Issue cover a wide variety of topics in the dynamic field of cloud computing. Topics include:
- Adoption of the cloud by higher education institutions and on-demand access to storage resources across of cloud infrastructures.
- Development of secure virtual research environments for multidisciplinary research
- A paper on ‘GATECloud.net,’which supports : a large-scale, open-source text processing on the cloud.
- The CARMEN virtual laboratory platform for integrating scientific code through a service-oriented infrastructure.
All the papers are of high quality, and well worth looking into.