The Zcloudflow joint project between the Kerdata and Zenith teams is funded by Microsoft in the context of the Joint Inria – Microsoft Research Centre. For Zenith, the project is headed by Esther Pacitti and Patrick Valduriez.
The project addresses the problem of advanced data storage and processing for supporting scientific workflows in the cloud. The goal is to design and implement a framework for the efficient processing of scientific workflows in clouds. Our approach will leverage the cloud infrastructure capabilities for handling and processing large data volumes. In order to support data-intensive workflows, our cloud-based solution will: 1) Adapt the workflows to the cloud environment and exploit its capabilities; 2) Optimize data transfers to provide reasonable times; 3) Manage data and tasks so that they can be efficiently placed and accessed during execution. The validation of this approach will be performed using synthetic benchmarks and real-life applications from bioinformatics: first on the Grid5000 platform in a preliminary phase, then on the Microsoft Azure cloud environment.
The proposed framework will be experimentally evaluated at large scale with scientific workflows in biology from IBC on the Azure cloud in collaboration with the EMIC Cloud Computing Team led by Goetz Brasche (ATL Europe) and the Information Services Lab led by Raghu Ramakrisnan (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, USA).
