A performance evaluation of TopHat RNA sequences alignment tool on openstack-based cloud environments

Despite its great promises, current Cloud offering has not been fully exploited for the management of Next-Generation Sequencing technologies. In fact, while dynamic resource allocation is typically required to ensure efficient and effective usage of the Cloud resources, Cloud providers have to deal with complex services, usually treated as black-boxes; hence, the estimation of the maximum number of resources that could improve service execution is a big challenge. This paper proposes and explores the benefits of Cloud deployment when operating a processor-hungry RNA alignment tool. The goal is to show the advantages of the virtualized and Cloud-aware approach compared to a typical bare-metal deployment. Extensive results demonstrate that our approach is as a viable first step toward easing the deployment and improving run-time service scaling.