Cloud computing is an on-demand service model often based on virtualization technique and this paper explores the use of cloud computing for scientific workflows, focusing on a widely used application. The approach is to evaluate from the point of view of a scientific workflow the tradeoffs between running in a local environment, if such is available, and running in a virtual environment via remote, wide-area network resource access. Our results show that a workflow with short job runtimes, the virtual environment can provide good compute time performance but it can suffer from resource scheduling delays and wide area communications.
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