Bill Bryce and Ljubomir Buturovic: Case Study Using UniCloud and Amazon's EC2 for Research in the clouds.

Cloud Computing Conference - Cloud Slam 2009.
Abstract. UniCloud / Amazon's EC2 Case Study: Building HPC Clusters in the Cloud

Pathwork Diagnostics, Inc. develops molecular diagnostic tests to aid oncologists in the diagnosis of hard-to-identify cancer tumors by analyzing large libraries of gene expression profiles from tumor specimens which require massive amounts of computational power at certain peak times. Looking to avoid a large hardware investment while still meeting its processing needs, Pathwork turned to cloud computing and Univa UD's UniCloud product to build high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in the EC2 cloud, in order to perform their compute-intensive research and to meet peak processing needs – saving on CAPEX and OPEX while increasing the capacity to innovate.

A few highlights from the case study:

* "Our challenge was a perfect fit for cloud computing."
* "Without UniCloud, some of our most advanced research would simply not be feasible."
* "We're getting exactly what we need. We pay for HPC power only when we use it, using a cluster management system that's easy to use."
* "The decision to use UniCloud was basically a no-brainer.
* "UniCloud minimizes both our initial and long-term investments in HPC."

THe case study will give a real life example of a customer not only saving big by using cloud technology, but the advantages of cloud computing for research innovations which would otherwise have been infeasible.

Video of the session: