High-Performance Mining of COVID-19 Open Research Datasets for Text Classification and Insights in Cloud Computing Environments

The COVID-19 global pandemic is an unprecedented health crisis. Many researchers around the world have produced an extensive collection of literature since the outbreak. Analysing this information to extract knowledge and provide meaningful insights in a timely manner requires a considerable amount of computational power. Cloud platforms are designed to provide this computational power in an on-demand and elastic manner. Specifically, hybrid clouds, composed of private and public data centers, are particularly well suited to deploy computationally intensive workloads in a cost-efficient, yet scalable manner. In this paper, we developed a system utilising the Aneka Platform as a Service middleware with parallel processing and multi-cloud capability to accelerate the data process pipeline and article categorising process using machine learning on a hybrid cloud. The results are then persisted for further referencing, searching and visualising. The performance evaluation shows that the system can help with reducing processing time and achieving linear scalability. Beyond COVID-19, the application might be used directly in broader scholarly article indexing and analysing.