Abstractions for Loosely-Coupled and Ensemble-Based Simulations on Azure

Azure is an emerging cloud platform developed and operated by Microsoft. It provides a range of abstractions and building blocks for creating scalable and reliable scientific applications. In this paper we investigate the applicability of the Azure abstractions to the well-known class of loosely coupled and ensemble-based applications. We propose the Big Job API as a novel abstraction for managing groups of Azure worker roles and for remotely executing tasks on them. We demonstrate that Azure enhanced with Big Job functionality provides performance comparable to other grid and cloud offerings loosely-coupled applications.