Victor Fernandez Albor

Rafhyc: an Architecture for Constructing Resilient Services on Federated Hybrid Clouds

Federated hybrid clouds is a model of service access and delivery to community cloud infrastructures. This model opens an opportunity window to allow the integration of the enhanced science (eScience) with the Cloud paradigm. The eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed computing infrastructures. Nowadays, the eScience big issue on Cloud Computing is how to leverage on-demand computing in scientific research. This requires innovation at multiple levels, from architectural design to software platforms. This paper characterizes the requirements of a federated hybrid cloud model of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to provide eScience. Additionally, an architecture is defined for constructing Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) in a resilient manner over federated resources. This architecture is named Rafhyc (for Resilient Architecture of Federated HYbrid Clouds). This paper also describes a prototype implementation of the Rafhyc architecture, which integrates an interoperable community middleware, named DIRAC, with federated hybrid clouds. In this way DIRAC is providing SaaS for scientific computing purposes, demonstrating that Rafhyc architecture can bring together eScience and federated hybrid clouds.Federated hybrid clouds is a model of service access and delivery to community cloud infrastructures. This model opens an opportunity window to allow the integration of the enhanced science (eScience) with the Cloud paradigm. The eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed computing infrastructures. Nowadays, the eScience big issue on Cloud Computing is how to leverage on-demand computing in scientific research. This requires innovation at multiple levels, from architectural design to software platforms. This paper characterizes the requirements of a federated hybrid cloud model of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to provide eScience. Additionally, an architecture is defined for constructing Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) in a resilient manner over federated resources. This architecture is named Rafhyc (for Resilient Architecture of Federated HYbrid Clouds). This paper also describes a prototype implementation of the Rafhyc architecture, which integrates an interoperable community middleware, named DIRAC, with federated hybrid clouds. In this way DIRAC is providing SaaS for scientific computing purposes, demonstrating that Rafhyc architecture can bring together eScience and federated hybrid clouds.

The Integration of CloudStack and OCCI/OpenNebula with DIRAC

The increasing availability of Cloud resources is arising as a realistic alternative to the Grid as a paradigm for enabling scientific communities to access large distributed computing resources. The DIRAC framework for distributed computing is an easy way to efficiently access to resources from both systems. This paper explains the integration of DIRAC with two open-source Cloud Managers: OpenNebula (taking advantage of the OCCI standard) and CloudStack. These are computing tools to manage the complexity and heterogeneity of distributed data center infrastructures, allowing to create virtual clusters on demand, including public, private and hybrid clouds. This approach has required to develop an extension to the previous DIRAC Virtual Machine engine, which was developed for Amazon EC2, allowing the connection with these new cloud managers. In the OpenNebula case, the development has been based on the CernVM Virtual Software Appliance with appropriate contextualization, while in the case of CloudStack, the infrastructure has been kept more general, which permits other Virtual Machine sources and operating systems being used. In both cases, CernVM File System has been used to facilitate software distribution to the computing nodes. With the resulting infrastructure, the cloud resources are transparent to the users through a friendly interface, like the DIRAC Web Portal. The main purpose of this integration is to get a system that can manage cloud and grid resources at the same time. This particular feature pushes DIRAC to a new conceptual denomination as interware, integrating different middleware. Users from different communities do not need to care about the installation of the standard software that is available at the nodes, nor the operating system of the host machine which is transparent to the user. This paper presents an analysis of the overhead of the virtual layer, doing some tests to compare the proposed approach with the existing Grid solution. License Notice: Published under licence in Journal of Physics: Conference Series by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Cloud flexibility using DIRAC interware

Communities of different locations are running their computing jobs on dedicated infrastructures without the need to worry about software, hardware or even the site where their programs are going to be executed. Nevertheless, this usually implies that they are restricted to use certain types or versions of an Operating System because either their software needs an definite version of a system library or a specific platform is required by the collaboration to which they belong. On this scenario, if a data center wants to service software to incompatible communities, it has to split its physical resources among those communities. This splitting will inevitably lead to an underuse of resources because the data centers are bound to have periods where one or more of its subclusters are idle. It is, in this situation, where Cloud Computing provides the flexibility and reduction in computational cost that data centers are searching for. This paper describes a set of realistic tests that we ran on one of such implementations. The test comprise software from three different HEP communities (Auger, LHCb and QCD phenomelogists) and the Parsec Benchmark Suite running on one or more of three Linux flavors (SL5, Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 13). The implemented infrastructure has, at the cloud level, CloudStack that manages the virtual machines (VM) and the hosts on which they run, and, at the user level, the DIRAC framework along with a VM extension that will submit, monitorize and keep track of the user jobs and also requests CloudStack to start or stop the necessary VMs. In this infrastructure, the community software is distributed via the CernVM-FS, which has been proven to be a reliable and scalable software distribution system. With the resulting infrastructure, users are allowed to send their jobs transparently to the Data Center. The main purpose of this system is the creation of flexible cluster, multiplatform with an scalable method for software distribution for several VOs. Users from different communities do not need to care about the installation of the standard software that is available at the nodes, nor the operating system of the host machine, which is transparent to the user.

Multivariate Analysis of Variance for High Energy Physics Software in Virtualized Environments

Victor Fernandez Albor1, Marcos Seco1, Victor Mendez Munoz2, Tomas Fernandez Pena3, Juan Saborido Silva1 and Ricardo Graciani Diaz4 1 Physics department, Santiago de Compostela University Av Ciencias sn, Santiago de Compostela, Spain E-mail: {victormanuel.fernandez,marcos.seco,juan.saborido}@usc.es 2 Computer Architecture and Operating Systems (CAOS),Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona E-mail: victor.mendez@uab.es 3 Research Center in Information Technologies (CiTIUS), Santiago de Compostela University Av Ciencias sn, Santiago de Compostela, Spain E-mail: tf.pena@usc.es 4 Departamento de Estructura y Constituyentes de la Materia,Barcelona University E-mail: Ricardo.graciani@ecm.ub.es