Investigation of Economical and Practical Aspects of Commercial Cloud Computing for Life Sciences

this work will give information about availability, value for money (computing costs, input/output data transfer costs), scalability and portability both for existing solutions (UZH Matterhorn Cluster / FGCZ Cluster)) and for the cloud computing approach. Based on this data one can find out at what point commercial cloud computing is cheaper than ”local cluster computing” by considering purchase costs, maintenance, staff costs, cooling costs and so on. To achieve this purpose, a lot of simulations on the cloud computing side need to be performed for jobs that are already processed in the local cluster. These simulations would allow to collect information about correctness, running time, job size and other interesting features that would enable to discern the advantages of one method or the other. The software prototype, developed in the context of this thesis will be able to communicate with the FGCZ data management system, where the data sets as well as their processing results reside.