Performance evaluation of FreeSurfer medical application in cloud computing

FreeSurfer is set of scientific medical applications mostly used to study brain tissue and its related diseases. Its performance is a key point in order to improve the required time to establish a precise diagnostic. In this paper, the suitability of cloud infrastructures to deploy and run FreeSurfer is analyzed. The results show that KVM based cloud infrastructures deployed on commodity hardware can be used to execute this application, since a very low overhead is introduced on its performance when the results are compared with the physical host. FreeSurfer cloud deployments have several advantages as the possibility of scaling the computing resources on demand, as they are required.

keywords: FreeSurfer, cloud, benchmark, CloudStack, high performance computing