Special issue on Science-Driven Cloud Computing

Current research conducted in the developments of cloud computing infrastructures for high-performance computing (HPC) and parallel computing area are discussed. Manish Parashar et al.'s 'Autonomic management of applications workflows on hybrid computing infrastructure' proposes a framework to manage autonomics, including scheduling the mix of hybrid resources, application management, monitoring resources and adaptation of resource provisioning based on objectives and metrics. Zach Hill et al.'s 'Early observations on the performance of Windows Azure' presents the results of comprehensive performance experiments conducted on Windows Azure from October 2009 to February 2010. Gabriela Turcu et al.'s 'Reshaping text data for efficient processing on Amazon EC2' investigates provisioning on the Amazon EC2 cloud from the user perspective, attempting to provide a scheduling strategy that is both timely and cost effective.