NSDF-Cloud

Abstract

Computational resources are increasingly provisioned to users through cloud-like interfaces. Both academic and commercial cloud offerings exist, but no single standardized interface for common actions such as configuration, launching, and termination of virtual resources exists. This imposes huge technical burden on domain scientist that attempt to take advantage of these resources; even expert users spend considerable time to port their applications from one cloud platform to another.With this work, we make available to the community a unified API toolkit as well as five in-depth reports on challenges we encountered working with different academic and commercial cloud providers. Our toolkit implements automations for common tasks such as simultaneous launching and termination of large numbers of virtual machines (VM) across the cloud. We demonstrate that our toolkit brings down the time users need to spend launching and terminating these resources to mere minutes, thus enabling ad-hoc multi-cloud clusters.