Introduction
The IM is currently being used in production in different areas. It is the component used for virtual infrastructure provision in EC3 to deploy elastic virtual clusters on multi-clouds. It is used to automate the deployment process of complex infrastructures for medical services (TRENCADIS) and for educational organizations (ODISEA). Furthermore, the IM is chosen as one of the orchestrator components to deploy applications and services for the INDIGO-DataCloud European project, which aims at creating a PaaS Cloud for scientific communities. Finally, the IM has been selected as the orchestrator component in the EGI AppDB Dashboard to deploy VMs in the EGI FedCloud platform.
EC3 (Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster)
In EC3 the IM is used combined with the CLUES elasticity management software for clusters. to enable the deployment of virtual elastic clusters on Cloud platforms. The IM is used to provision and customize the nodes from a Cloud infrastructure and the management of the cluster size is automatically managed by CLUES.
First, the user deploys the front-end node of the cluster using EC3, which in turn contacts the IM. The front-end is configured with another IM and the control of the infrastructure is transferred. Afterwards, CLUES internally uses that IM to provision the VMs that will be used as working nodes for the cluster. For that, it uses a RADL document where the features of the working nodes are specified. Once these nodes are available, they are automatically integrated in the cluster as new available nodes for the LRMS (Local Resource Management System). Working nodes are provisioned and terminated according to certain elasticity rules (such as the number of jobs queued up at the LRMS).
More information on EC3 is available at the EC3 web page at the GRyCAP's YouTube channel and in the following publication:
Miguel, Caballer, Carlos de Alfonso, Fernando Alvarruiz, and Germán Moltó. 2013. EC3: Elastic Cloud Computing Cluster. Journal of Computer and System Sciences 79: 1341–51.
ODISEA: On Demand Deployment of virtual Infrastructures to Support Educational Activities
The ODISEA platform enables instructors to deploy their own complex virtual infrastructures to be used for educational activities. This enables instructors to define the hardware, software and configuration features of the infrastructures and let the IM deploy them effectively on on-premises and public Clouds. By leveraging the IM functionality to provision and configure the resources, instructors can now deploy virtual clusters, Hadoop clusters, Grid deployments and even Cloud deployments within minutes for their edcucational activities.
This tool has been extensively employed to support the operational activity of the Master's Degree in Parallel and Distributed Computing at the Universitat Politècnica de València. This has enabled instructors to reuse descriptions of virtual infrastructures and students to access a myriad of diverse computational infrastructures to gain the appropriate skills.
More information on ODISEA is available in the following publication:
J. Damian Segrelles, Germán Moltó, and Miguel Caballer. 2015. Remote Computational Labs for Educational Activities via a Cloud Computing Platform. In 2015 Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference (ISECON), 309–21
[Best Paper Award]
TRENCADIS Cloud Infrastructure
TRENCADIS is a Grid infrastructure to store and process large amounts of medical images and its associated data in DICOM objects. The IM is employed to simplify the coordinated deployment process of the multiple TRENCADIS services. By creating recipes for installation of the different services, the IM performs the automated deployment of services both on on-premises and on public Clouds, if required.
More information is available at the following publication:
J. Damià Segrelles, Miguel Caballer, Erik Torres, Germán Moltó, and Ignacio Blanquer. 2013. Platform to Ease the Deployment and Improve the Availability of TRENCADIS Infrastructure. In 7th Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference (IberGrid), 133–45.