Phylogenetic code in the cloud - can it meet the expectations?
Kraut, A.; Moretti, S.éb.; Robinson-Rechavi, M.; Stockinger, H.; Flanders, D.
Studies in Health Technology and Informatics 159: 55-63
2010
ISSN/ISBN: 0926-9630 PMID: 20543426 Document Number: 647044
Cloud computing has recently become very popular, and several bioinformatics applications exist already in that domain. The aim of this article is to analyse a current cloud system with respect to usability, benchmark its performance and compare its user friendliness with a conventional cluster job submission system. Given the current hype on the theme, user expectations are rather high, but current results show that neither the price/performance ratio nor the usage model is very satisfactory for large-scale embarrassingly parallel applications. However, for small to medium scale applications that require CPU time at certain peak times the cloud is a suitable alternative.