Improving Scientific Workflow with Cloud Offloading

Abstract: Scientific workflow is a powerful tool to streamline and organize computational steps of scientific application. This paper presents Emerald, a system that adds sophisticated cloud offloading capabilities to scientific workflows. Emerald automatically offloads computation intensive steps of scientific workflow to the cloud in order to enhance workflow performance. Emerald provides easy-to-use APIs to help developers build cloud offloading enabled scientific workflows. Evaluation showed that Emerald can effectively reduce up to 55% of execution time for scientific applications.