A platform to deploy customized scientific virtual infrastructures on the cloud

Abstract

SUMMARYThis paper presents a software platform to dynamically deploy complex scientific virtual computing infrastructures, on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. The platform orchestrates different services to provision the virtual computing resources. It dynamically installs the appropriate software to satisfy the requirements of a researcher, both on public and on-premise Clouds. The platform provides a web interface to enable the users to easily management of the lifecycle of virtual infrastructures. It enables users to define infrastructures, share them with other users, deploy and relinquish them, add or remove resources dynamically, create and share application recipes, etc. The paper also describes three case studies to deploy complex infrastructures, namely a Hadoop cluster, a single-node to perform NGS sequencing and a gateway for users to access the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). This platform promotes a better use of on-premise hardware resources of a research center by allocating the computing resources just-in-time to the specific life time of the virtual infrastructures as well as the deployment of the very same infrastructures on a public Cloud.

Science gateway workshops 2014 special issue conference publications

“…NEWT has been applied at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center since 2010. A similar approach is followed by Caballer et al . They have developed services for scientific virtual infrastructures on the cloud provisioned as Infrastructure‐as‐a‐Service.…”

Cloud architecture for plant phenotyping research

“…The main disadvantage of Globus Genomics is that I/O becomes a bottleneck when multiple concurrent applications start accessing the same file system thus deteriorating the performance. 11 Caballer et al 12 presented a platform capable of deploying on specific demand and complex configurations crucial to conducting specific research. In addition, the platform is capable of integrating public and local cloud resources to meet the needs of researchers, and also to make computational resources available for other users.…”