Execution of Grid Sites on Private/Hybrid Clouds

StratusLab is exploring the integration of cloud technologies and services, especially virtualisation, into existing Grid Infrastructures. Using private cloud technologies for resource provisioning would enhance failover and redundancy solutions, and permit machine migration for flexible load balancing and energy efficiency. Virtualization of the site infrastructure would also allow the dynamic provisioning of worker nodes to address the demands of different user communities. Using hybrid cloud technologies would support “elastic” sites able to expand available computing resources in the local cloud to meet peak demands using remote cloud providers

The key issue with productive use of the technologies is effective management of the cloud resources. For broad adoption, cloud resources must be managable with the same (or similar) techniques currently used by administrators of data centers. The initial activities of the collaboration will investigate how different management techniques can be adapted to cloud resources.

After investigating the management issues, the collaboration will move on to see how “inner” and “outer” clouds can be integrated. The outer clouds are those currently offered by commercial providers (for example, Amazon Web Services). An inner cloud would be a private data center using cloud technologies to manage it's resources. Seamless integration of the two domains brings unprecedented flexibility to system administrators and to users of the systems. Within research environments, an open source cloud implementation would be necessary.

This research will extend the work demonstrated in Scaling out EGEE sites on Amazon EC2 with OpenNebula, EGEE 4th User Forum/OGF25 & OGF-Europe's 2nd International Event, 2-6 March 2009, Catania, Italy