Developing a Cost-Effective Virtual Cluster on the Cloud

摘要

The Cloud provides highly democratic access to computer services on a pay-per-use basis. A fact that has encouraged many researchers to adopt the Cloud for the processing of large computational tasks and data storage. This has been used in the past for single research endeavours or as mechanism for coping with excessive load on conventional computational resources (clusters). In this paper we investigate, through the use of simulation, the applicability of running an entire computer cluster on the Cloud. We investigate a number of policy decisions which can be made over such a virtual cluster to reduce the running cost and the effect these policies have on the users of the cluster.