Porting Grid Applications to the Cloud with Schlouder

Abstract

This paper presents Schlouder, a broker of IaaS cloud resources which helps users to take advantage of IaaS elasticity. The main advantages of Schlouder are its simplicity, its extensibility, and its capability to provide the user with a prediction of the make span and cost, given the chosen provisioning strategy and before any actual execution. This paper illustrates how Schlouder enables, with a very limited engineering effort, the port of a bag-of-tasks scientific application which was originally developed for the European Grid Infrastructure. Experiments in real environment support assessments on Schlouder efficiency and comparison between grids and clouds for scientific computations. We conclude that porting grid applications to the cloud represents a shift in the associated problematics: from tailoring the application to the platform, to tailoring the platform to the application.