Reducing Energy Consumption by Using Clouds

Cloud computing is a promising technology for the realization of large, scalable, and on-demand provisioned computing infrastructures. Currently, many enterprises are adopting Clouds to achieve high performance and scalability for their applications while maintaining low costs. Service provisioning in the Cloud is based on a set of predefined nonfunctional properties specified and negotiated by means of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Cloud workloads are dynamic and change constantly. Thus, in order to reduce steady human interactions, self-manageable Cloud techniques are required to comply with the agreed customers´ SLAs. Flexible and reliable management of SLAs is of paramount importance for both, Cloud providers and consumers. On one hand, the prevention of SLA violations avoids penalties that are costly to providers. On the other hand, based on flexible and timely reactions to possible SLA violation threats, user interaction with the system can be minimized enabling Cloud computing to take roots as a flexible and reliable form of on-demand computing. Furthermore, a trade-off has to be found between proactive actions that prevent SLA violations and those that reduce energy consumption, i.e., increase energy efficiency. In this talk we discuss how the application of Cloud computing technologies can support the work of scientists working in the field of high-throughput sequencing, while at the same time optimizing utilization of resource and increasing energy efficiency.