Guest Editors Introduction: Special Issue on Scientific Cloud Computing

The papers in this special section contribute important advances towards leveraging clouds for scientific applications. The contributions focus on a broad range of topics, including: performance modeling and optimization, data management, resource allocation and scheduling, elasticity, reconfiguration, cost prediction and optimization. Most papers revolve around general techniques and approaches that are agnostic of the applications, while two contributions demonstrate how domain specific scientific applications can be migrated to the cloud.