Managing hot metadata for scientific workflows on multisite clouds

Abstract

Large-scale scientific applications are often expressed as workflows that help defining data dependencies between their different components. Several such workflows have huge storage and computation requirements, and so they need to be processed in multiple (cloud-federated) datacenters. It has been shown that efficient metadata handling plays a key role in the performance of computing systems. However, most of this evidence concern only single-site, HPC systems to date. In this paper, we present a hybrid decentralized/distributed model for handling hot metadata (frequently accessed metadata) in multisite architectures. We couple our model with a scientific workflow management system (SWfMS) to validate and tune its applicability to different real-life scientific scenarios. We show that efficient management of hot metadata improves the performance of SWfMS, reducing the workflow execution time up to 50% for highly parallel jobs and avoiding unnecessary cold metadata operations.