ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the proposal developed under the e-Clouds project, which is designed to be a software-as-a-service marketplace for scientific applications running on top of a public cloud infrastructure. It provides a description of the most important aspects of e-Clouds architecture, emphasizing the different patterns applied for using cloud resources while hiding the complexity for the end user. Cloud providers offer a large set of infrastructure and application services to resemble the flexibility of private data centers, with the benefit of a pay-per-use model. In a general definition, high performance in a scientific context means processing large data sets with large-scale resources. This imposes some challenges for the design of a cloud computing solution for researchers, including special attention to the details of the software and infrastructure offered by cloud providers. Even though there is an important variety regarding hardware and software available, in general, cloud providers do not offer a platform designed specifically for scientific computation.
