Opportunities and Challenges in Running Scientific Workflows on the Cloud

Cloud computing is gaining tremendous momentum in both academia and industry. The application of Cloud computing, however, has mostly focused on Web applications and business applications; while the recognition of using Cloud computing to support large-scale workflows, especially data-intensive scientific workflows on the Cloud is still largely overlooked. We coin the term "Cloud Workflow", to refer to the specification, execution, provenance tracking of large-scale scientific workflows, as well as the management of data and computing resources to enable the execution of scientific workflows on the Cloud. In this paper, we analyze why there has been such a gap between the two technologies, and what it means to bring Cloud and workflow together; we then present the key challenges in running Cloud workflow, and discuss the research opportunities in realizing workflows on the Cloud.