Performance and Cost Trade-Off in IaaS Environments: A Scientific Workflow Simulation Environment Case Study

The adoption of the workflow technology in the eScience domain has contributed to the increase of simulation-based applications orchestrating different services in a flexible and error-free manner. The nature of the provisioning and execution of such simulations makes them potential candidates to be migrated and executed in Cloud environments. The wide availability of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud offerings and service providers has contributed to a raise in the number of supporters of partially or completely migrating and running their scientific experiments in the Cloud. Focusing on Scientific Workflow-based Simulation Environments (SWfSE) applications and their corresponding underlying runtime support, in this research work we aim at empirically analyzing and evaluating the impact of migrating such an environment to multiple IaaS infrastructures. More specifically, we focus on the investigation of multiple Cloud providers and their corresponding optimized and non-optimized IaaS offerings with respect to their offered performance, and its impact on the incurred monetary costs when migrating and executing a SWfSE. The experiments show significant performance improvements and reduced monetary costs when executing the simulation environment in off-premise Clouds.