A Quality-Aware Computational Cloud Service for Computational Modellers

Cloud computing, a relatively recent term, builds on decades of research in virtualization, distributed computing, utility computing, and more recently networking. It is an emerging paradigm for large scale infrastructures and there is a growing use of Cloud computing as it provides on-demand High performance computing (HPC) resources. On the other end a Cloud service provides a predictable and flexible on-demand pay-per-use ac-cess to a shared pool of computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services). This research has been conducted to help computational modellers, to select the most cost effective Cloud service provider. In this paper a novel quality aware computational cloud selection service (QaCompPSS) is proposed and evaluated. This selects the best (cheapest) cloud provider's service. After selection, it automatically sets up and runs selected services. QaCompPSS includes an integrated ontology that makes use of OWL-2 features. The ontology provides a standard specification and a common vocabulary for describing cloud provider's services. The semantic descriptions are processed by QaCompPSS information management service and the non-semantic selection and run services.