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Distributed Execution of Dynamically Defined Tasks on Microsoft Azure

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Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9573))

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Abstract

Microsoft Azure is a relatively new public cloud service which has potentially much to offer to the scientific community, but has not yet been widely used for research applications. This paper evaluates suitability of Microsoft Azure as a platform for execution of computational applications in three scenarios: we evaluate dynamic horizontal scaling, distributed execution of a CPU-intensive application – POV-Ray raytracer, and distributed execution of a bioinformatics application – ExonVisualizer. To this end, we created a Distributed Task Library (DTL), due to lack of free, simple solution for distributed execution of dynamically defined tasks in .NET. In conclusion, we show that while dynamic horizontal scaling is quite slow, Microsoft Azure is a worthy platform for computational applications, offering, in conjunction with DTL, an easy way to speed up CPU-intensive, embarrassingly parallel problems.

M. Malawski—This research was partially supported by EU FP7-ICT project PaaSage (317715), Polish grant 3033/7PR/2014/2 and AGH grant 11.11.230.124.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland

    Piotr Wiewiura & Maciej Malawski

  2. Department of Bioinformatics and Telemedicine, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

    Monika Piwowar

Authors
  1. Piotr Wiewiura
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  2. Maciej Malawski
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  3. Monika Piwowar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maciej Malawski .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Czestochowa University of Technolog, Czestochowa, Poland

    Roman Wyrzykowski

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Marina Del Rey, California, USA

    Ewa Deelman

  3. Electrical Engineering & Comput. Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

    Jack Dongarra

  4. Czestochowa University of Technology, Institute of Computer & Information Sci., Czestochowa, Poland

    Konrad Karczewski

  5. Department of Computer Science, AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland

    Jacek Kitowski

  6. Systèmes d’informations, Big Data et Rec, AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland

    Kazimierz Wiatr

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Wiewiura, P., Malawski, M., Piwowar, M. (2016). Distributed Execution of Dynamically Defined Tasks on Microsoft Azure. In: Wyrzykowski, R., Deelman, E., Dongarra, J., Karczewski, K., Kitowski, J., Wiatr, K. (eds) Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics. PPAM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9573. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32149-3_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32149-3_28

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32148-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32149-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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