FIT1016 &FIT2044 Advanced Project

Semester 2, 2008

Applications of Cloud computing to e-Research

Supervisor: Prof. David Abramson

 

Over the past several years, we have developed a specialized parametric modeling system called Nimrod . Nimrod uses a simple declarative parametric modeling language to express a parametric experiment and provides machinery that automates the task of formulating, running, monitoring, and collating the results from the multiple individual experiments. Equally important, Nimrod incorporates a distributed scheduling component that can manage the scheduling of individual experiments to idle computers in a local area network. Together, these features mean that even complex parametric experiments can be defined and run with little programmer effort. In many cases it is possible to establish a new experiment in minutes. Nimrod has been applied to a range of application areas, including Bioinformatics, Operations Research, Network Simulation, Electronic CAD, Ecological Modelling and Business Process Simulation.

(www.csse.monash.edu.au/~davida/nimrod)

 

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)  is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to

make web-scale computing easier for developers.

 

Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.  Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios. (http://www.amazon.com/)

 

In this project the student will build an adapter that allows our Nimrod/G software to launch jobs on the Amazon Elastic Cloud. It will expose the student to distributed computing, high performance computing and Web Services.