  COVID-19 global pandemic is an unprecedented health crisis. Since the
outbreak, many researchers around the world have produced an extensive
collection of literatures. For the research community and the general public to
digest, it is crucial to analyse the text and provide insights in a timely
manner, which requires a considerable amount of computational power. Clouding
computing has been widely adopted in academia and industry in recent years. In
particular, hybrid cloud is gaining popularity since its two-fold benefits:
utilising existing resource to save cost and using additional cloud service
providers to gain assess to extra computing resources on demand. In this paper,
we developed a system utilising the Aneka PaaS middleware with parallel
processing and multi-cloud capability to accelerate the ETL and article
categorising process using machine learning technology on a hybrid cloud. The
result is then persisted for further referencing, searching and visualising.
Our performance evaluation shows that the system can help with reducing
processing time and achieving linear scalability. Beyond COVID-19, the
application might be used directly in broader scholarly article indexing and
analysing.
