Scientific Computing in the Cloud

Abstract: We investigate the feasibility of high performance scientific computation using cloud computers as an alternative to traditional computational tools. The availability of these large, virtualized pools of compute resources raises the possibility of a new compute paradigm for scientific research with many advantages. For research groups, cloud computing provides convenient access to reliable, high performance clusters and storage, without the need to purchase and maintain sophisticated hardware. For developers, virtualization allows scientific codes to be optimized and pre-installed on machine images, facilitating control over the computational environment. Preliminary tests are presented for serial and parallelized versions of the widely used x-ray spectroscopy and electronic structure code FEFF on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, including CPU and network performance.