Distributed Caching of Scientific Workflows in Multisite Cloud

Abstract

Many scientific experiments are performed using scientific workflows, which are becoming more and more data-intensive. We consider the efficient execution of such workflows in the cloud, leveraging the heterogeneous resources available at multiple cloud sites (geo-distributed data centers). Since it is common for workflow users to reuse code or data from other workflows, a promising approach for efficient workflow execution is to cache intermediate data in order to avoid re-executing entire workflows. In this paper, we propose a solution for distributed caching of scientific workflows in a multisite cloud. We implemented our solution in the OpenAlea workflow system, together with cache-aware distributed scheduling algorithms. Our experimental evaluation on a three-site cloud with a data-intensive application in plant phenotyping shows that our solution can yield major performance gains, reducing total time up to 42% with 60% of same input data for each new execution.