Early Cloud Experiences With The Kepler Scientific Workflow System

With the increasing popularity of the Cloud computing, there are more and more requirements for scientific workflows to utilize Cloud resources. In this paper, we present our preliminary work and experiences on enabling the interaction between the Kepler scientific workflow system and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). A set of EC2 actors and Kepler Amazon Machine Images are introduced with the discussion on their different usage modes. Through two bioinformatics usecases, we demonstrate the capability of our work for both Cloud resource coordination and workflow execution on virtual Cloud resources.