Meteorological simulations in the cloud with the ASKALON environment

Abstract

Precipitation in mountainous regions is an essential process in meteorological research for its strong impact on the hydrological cycle. To support scientists, we present the design of a meteorological application using the ASKALON environment comprising graphical workflow modeling and execution in a Cloud computing environment. We illustrate performance results that demonstrate that, although limited by Amdahl's law, our workflow can gain important speedup when executed in a virtualized Cloud environment with important operational cost reductions. Results from the meteorological research show the usefulness of our model for determining precipitation distribution in the case of two field campaigns over Norway. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.