Many applications of world strategic importance, such as those employed in the Oil and Gas industry, meteorology, and in the areas of biodiversity and health, depend on High-Performance Computing (HPC) to provide accurate results in short time frames. Computational clouds have emerged as a low-cost alternative to HPC, offering a set of virtualized resources that can be quickly provisioned and dynamically allocated. However, there are still several barriers to its use, such as efficient and scalable use of resources, selection of virtual machines (VMs), and scheduling of tasks on these VMs, which have a direct impact on performance and financial costs. Furthermore, cloud VMs are prone to revocations in the cheaper markets, and to satisfy service level agreements, fault tolerance of cloud VMs is a major concern.
In this talk, we will introduce some resource management problems in clouds and we will present some strategies to solve them, aiming at the efficient use of these platforms by HPC applications.