Stratus: A Distributed Computing Framework for Scientific Simulations on the Cloud

Cloud is a promising source for computing resources when solving scientific problems. Several large companies have entered the cloud computing market in recent times and are providing cloud computing services like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that provide virtual computer machines on demand. These virtual machines can easily be used for the high performance computing needs by applying distributed computing methods and frameworks. The SciCloud project at the University of Tartu has studied adapting scientific computing algorithms to different distributed computing frameworks like MapReduce and its optimizations. The study has concluded that the current solutions do not fully support complex iterative algorithms, which are commonly used in scientific simulations. This paper presents a design for a new distributed computing framework, Stratus, which fully supports scientific computing algorithms and takes advantage of the characteristics that have made cloud such a convenient and popular source for computing resources. The paper also describes the motivation for creating a brand new solution, outlines its architecture and design, and gives an overview on how algorithms can be adapted to this framework.