Computation and Storage in the Cloud

3

Motivating Example and Research Issues

The research in this book is motivated by a real-world scientific application. In this chapter, Section 3.1 introduces a motivating example of a pulsar searching application from astrophysics; Section 3.2 analyses the problems and challenges of deploying scientific applications in the cloud; Section 3.3 describes the specific research issues of this book in detail.

3.1 Motivating Example

The Swinburne Astrophysics group has been conducting pulsar searching surveys using the observation data from the Parkes Radio Telescope, which is one of the most famous radio telescopes in the world.¹ Pulsar searching is a typical scientific application. It involves complex and time-consuming tasks and needs to process ...