Cloud infrastructures have seen increasing popularity for addressing the growing computational needs of today's scientific and engineering applications. However, resource management challenges exist in the elastic cloud environment, such as resource provisioning and task allocation, especially when data movement between multiple domains plays an important role. In this work, we study the impact of data-aware resource management and scheduling on scientific workflows in multicloud environments. We develop a workflow simulator based on a network simulation framework for fine-grained simulation for workflow computation and data movement. Using the workload traces from a production metagenomic data analysis service, we evaluate different resource scheduling mechanisms, including proposed data-aware scheduling policies under various resource and bandwidth configurations. The results of this work are expected to answer questions about how to provision computing resources for certain workloads efficiently and how to place tasks across multidomain clouds in order to reduce data movement costs for overall improved system performance.

In preparation for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, the climate community will run the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP-5) experiments, which are designed to answer crucial questions about future regional climate change and the results of carbon feedback for different mitigation scenarios. The CMIP-5 experiments will generate petabytes of data that must be replicated seamlessly, reliably, and quickly to hundreds of research teams around the globe. As an end-to-end test of the technologies that will be used to perform this task, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers moved a small portion (10 TB) of the multimodel Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 3 data set used in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report from three sources---the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)---to the 2009 Supercomputing conference (SC09) show floor in Portland, Oregon, over circuits provided by DOE's ESnet. The team achieved a sustained data rate of 15 Gb/s on a 20 Gb/s network. More important, this effort provided critical feedback on how to deploy, tune, and monitor the middleware that will be used to replicate the upcoming petascale climate datasets. We report on obstacles overcome and the key lessons learned from this successful bandwidth challenge effort.