In recent years, so-called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds have become increasingly popular as a flexible and inexpensive platform for ad-hoc parallel data processing. Major players in the cloud computing space like Amazon EC2 have already recognized this trend and started to create special offers which bundle their compute platform with existing software frameworks for these kinds of applications. However, the data processing frameworks which are currently used in these offers have been designed for static, homogeneous cluster systems and do not support the new features which distinguish the cloud platform. This chapter examines the characteristics of IaaS clouds with special regard to massively-parallel data processing. The author highlights use cases which are currently poorly supported by existing parallel data processing frameworks and explains how a tighter integration between the processing framework and the underlying cloud system can help to lower the monetary processing cost for the cloud customer. As a proof of concept, the author presents the parallel data processing framework Nephele, and compares its cost efficiency against the one of the well-known software Hadoop.
