A programming-level approach for elasticizing parallel scientific applications

Abstract

Elasticity is considered one of the fundamental properties of cloud computing. Several mechanisms to provide the feature are offered by public cloud providers and in some academic works. We argue these solutions are inefficient in providing elasticity for scientific applications, since they cannot consider the internal structure and behavior of applications. In this paper we present an approach for exploring the elasticity in scientific applications, in which the elasticity control is embedded in application source code and constructed using elasticity primitives. This approach enables the application itself to request or to release its own resources, taking into account the execution flow and runtime requirements. To support the construction of elastic applications using the presented approach, we developed the Cloudine framework. Cloudine provides all components necessary to construct and execute elastic scientific applications. The Cloudine effectiveness is demonstrated in the experiments where the platform is successfully used to include new features to existing applications, to extend functionalities of other elasticity frameworks and to add elasticity support to parallel programming libraries.