TCD Researchers Bridge Gap between ‘Cloud Computing’ and ‘Grid’ Technologies
Posted on: 02 August 2011
Trinity College researchers based at the School of Computer Science and Statistics who are involved in a collaborative project called StratusLab have produced new software to bridge the gap between ‘grid’ and ‘cloud computing’ infrastructures. Working in collaboration with five European partners, the TCD team, led by Research Fellow Dr David O’Callaghan, have been responsible for developing the StratusLab Marketplace, a registry of virtual machine or disk images which can be deployed on a StratusLab cloud.
StratusLab is an Internet-based software project that aims to enhance distributed computing infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), that allow research and higher education institutes around the world to pool computing resources. The project is funded through the European Framework Programme 7 (EU-FP7).
Computer grids are widely used by researchers in many scientific fields, enabling them to collaborate on research projects such as the Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN, or the search for new drugs to tackle malaria and other diseases. Cloud computing provides a way for organisations to access computing capacity without investing directly in new infrastructure, creating virtual machines which run on the resources of other organisations. The linking of grid and cloud technologies will make the grid easier to manage, and will allow grids to tap into commercial cloud services to meet peak demands, resulting in major benefits for European academic research.
Lead developer of the StratusLab Marketplace, Research Fellow at TCD’s School of Computer Science and Statistics, Dr Stuart Kenny commented: “Clouds use ‘machine images’, which are like virtual hard disks, to boot up ‘virtual machines’ where applications and services can run. The Marketplace aims to encourage users to share and reuse existing images rather than creating them from scratch.” Such sharing has the potential to significantly reduce the time and investment required for new users to begin using cloud infrastructures.
The StratusLab Marketplace stores metadata descriptions of virtual machine and disk images, and allows users to search for particular images that suit their requirements before downloading and deploying them directly to their local StratusLab installation. Base images for a number of operating systems are already available, along with images for grid machines and biomedical user community images. These were created both by the StratusLab project, and by user communities interested in sharing their images with their members and with members of other user communities. The project encourages user communities to try out the images and upload metadata descriptions of their own images to the Marketplace.
By using the StratusLab Marketplace to source images, users and site administrators can have confidence in the shared images they deploy. Metadata descriptions are cryptographically signed by their creators, and users can also endorse particular images with their own signature, telling others that they trust the image and its creator. This also allows system administrators to define policies for trusting images created or endorsed by particular users or communities, affording them more control over what third party virtual machines users run on their resources. Storage of the images themselves is left to the image owner, which allows them to restrict access to their images if desired.
The StratusLab project consists of numerous collaborators from six European research institutions. A website can be accessed via the following address: www.stratuslab.eu. The project is partially funded by the European Commission through the Grant Agreement RI-261552.