Scientific workflows on clouds with heterogeneous and preemptible instances

The cloud environment is increasingly appealing for the HPC community, which has always dealt with scientific applications. However, there is still some skepticism about moving from traditional physical infrastructures to virtual HPC clusters. This mistrusting probably originates from some well known factors, including the effective economy of using cloud services, data and software availability, and the longstanding matter of data stewardship. In this work we discuss the design of a framework (based on Mesos) aimed at achieving a cost-effective and efficient usage of heterogeneous Processing Elements (PEs) for workflow execution, which supports hybrid cloud bursting over preemptible cloud Virtual Machines.