Abstract: Major Cloud computing companies have started to integrate frameworks for parallel data processing in their product portfolio, making it easy for customers to access these services and to deploy their programs. However the processing frameworks which are currently used have been designed for static, homogeneous cluster setups and disregard the particular nature of a cloud. Consequently, the allocated compute resources may be inadequate for big parts of the submitted job and unnecessarily increase processing time and cost. We discuss here the opportunities and challenges for efficient parallel data processing in clouds and present our research project Nephele. Particular tasks of a processing job can be assigned to different types of virtual machines which are automatically instantiated and terminated during the job execution. Based on this new framework, we perform extended evaluations of Map Reduce-inspired processing jobs on an IaaS cloud system and compare the results to the popular data processing framework Hadoop.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Hadoop, Iaas, Amazon, Virtual Machine.