Optimised Cloud data centre operation supported by simulation

The first part of the paper discusses limitations of current Cloud offerings to efficiently support performance critical applications. A technical simulation from quantum chemistry is used as guiding example. The focus is on I/O performance being the major bottleneck for this kind of application and virtualisation in this area is much less developed compared to other hardware capabilities. Similar conclusions can be drawn for other I/O intensive applications, e.g. databases. The second part of this paper is about how simulation tools can support the validation and refinement of deployment decisions having more fine-grained description models of VM instances beyond existing coarse-grained models.