  The availability of powerful computing hardware in IaaS clouds makes cloud
computing attractive also for computational workloads that were up to now
almost exclusively run on HPC clusters.
  In this paper we present the VM-MAD Orchestrator software: an open source
framework for cloudbursting Linux-based HPC clusters into IaaS clouds but also
computational grids. The Orchestrator is completely modular, allowing flexible
configurations of cloudbursting policies. It can be used with any batch system
or cloud infrastructure, dynamically extending the cluster when needed. A
distinctive feature of our framework is that the policies can be tested and
tuned in a simulation mode based on historical or synthetic cluster accounting
data.
  In the paper we also describe how the VM-MAD Orchestrator was used in a
production environment at the FGCZ to speed up the analysis of mass
spectrometry-based protein data by cloudbursting to the Amazon EC2. The
advantages of this hybrid system are shown with a large evaluation run using
about hundred large EC2 nodes.
