Page 223 - DCAP312_WEB_TECHNOLOGIES_II

Unit 10: Web Services

Notes
as Amazon Web Services,” he said. Having built datacenters previously, Tonellato could not
afford the time he knew would be required to set up servers and then write code. Instead,
he decided to conduct a test to see how fast his team could put together a series of custom
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that would reflect the optimal development environment
for researchers’ web applications.
Now, Tonellato’s lab has extended their efforts to integrate Spot instances into their workflows
so that they could stretch their grant money even further. According to Tonellato, “We
leverage Spot instances when running EC2 clusters to analyze entire genomes. We have
the potential to run even more worker nodes at less cost when using Spot, so it is a huge
saving in both time and cost for us. To take advantage of these savings, it just took us a
day of engineering, and saw roughly 50% savings in cost.” Tonellato’s lab leverages MIT’s
StarCluster tools, which has built-in capabilities to manage an Oracle Grid Engine Cluster
on Spot Instances. Erik Gafni, a programmer in Tonellato’s lab, performed the integration
of StarCluster into our workflow. According to Gafni, “Using StarCluster, it was incredibly
easy to configure, launch, and start using a running Spot Cluster in less than 10 minutes.”

In addition the LPM recognized the need for published resources about how to effectively
use cloud computing in an academic environment and published an educational primer
in PLoS Computational Biology to address this need. “We believe this topic clearly shows
how an academic lab can effectively use AWS to manage their computing needs. It also
demonstrates how to think about computational problems in relation to AWS costs and
computing resources,” says Vincent Fusaro, lead author and senior research fellow in the LPM.

“The AWS solution is stable, robust, flexible, and low cost,” Tonellato commented. “It has
everything to recommend it.”
Tonellato runs his simulations on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which
provides customers with scalable compute capacity in the cloud. Designed to make web-scale
computing easier for developers, Amazon EC2 makes it possible to create and provision
compute capacity in the cloud within minutes.
Tonellato’s lab is thrilled with their AWS solution. “The number of genetic tests available
to doctors and hospitals is constantly increasing,” Tonellato explained, “and they can be
very expensive. We’re interested in determining which tests will result in better patient care
and better results.” He added, “We believe our models may dramatically reduce the time it
usually takes to identify the tests, protocols, and trials that are worth pursuing aggressively
for both FDA approval and clinical use.”
Questions
1. What are the advantages of Amazon Web services?

2. How did it provide the service to the school?
Self Assessment Questions

6. Web Service is a …………….. that uses XML to exchange information with other software
via common internet protocols.
( a) software program (b) hardware program
( c) Both of these (d) None of these.
7. XML Web services interfaces that are accessible from a ………………. variety of platforms
and programming languages.
( a) short (b) wide

( c) Both of these (d) None of these.

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