Middleware alternatives for storm surge predictions in Windows Azure

ABSTRACTCloud computing is a resource of significant value to computational science, but has proven itself to be not immediately realizable by the researcher. The cloud providers that offer a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform should, in theory, offer a sound alternative to infrastructure-as-a-service as it could be easier to take advantage of for computational science kinds of problems. The objective of our study is to assess how well the Azure platform as a service can serve a particular class of computational science application. We conduct a performance evaluation using three approaches to executing a high-throughput storm surge application: using Sigiri, a large scale resource abstraction tool, Windows Azure HPC scheduler, and Daytona, an Iterative Map-reduce runtime for Azure. The differences in the approaches including early performance measures for up to 500 instances are discussed.