Developing a Model Driven Approach for engineering applications based on mOSAIC: Towards sharing elastic components in the Cloud

In many scientific and engineering areas there are emerging software services available over the Web. The reason for deploying such services in the Cloud is either to reduce the operational costs or to support the peaks in their usage profiles. The algorithms employed in such services are usually result of a long term research and technology development work, so it is beneficial to reuse those critical application parts when developing new Cloud applications. This paper investigates the possibilities to introduce a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) for the Cloud computing domain, which would support composition, customization, flexibility, maintenance and reusability of Cloud application components in the particular case of scientific and engineering applications. The underlying middleware technology of choice is the mOSAIC Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. This choice is motivated by the fact that in mOSAIC a Cloud application consists of loosely coupled components, which are either generic and provide for key resource types needed by an application (computation, storage, communication) or custom made, e.g. based on existing legacy software. The MDA approach is illustrated through the design and operation of an application for analysis of structures under static loading. It is shown that a relatively simple design can be used to address two application bottlenecks: the varying number of users and the computational complexity of the given problem. The design reduces the necessary application development efforts and the key components can be reused for similar applications.