زیرساخت محاسبات ابری برای جامعه VPH Cloud computing infrastructure for the VPH community

1. INTRODUCTION The advent of modern distributed computing technologies, cloud computing being chief among them, offers new opportunities for developers and users of scientific applications, including in particular the domain referred to as “midrange science” or “long tail science” [1]. This is a category of applications which do not require vast computational resources yet must still be provisioned in a stable and managed environment in order to yield useful results. While computational clouds do not constitute a replacement for traditional high performance computing (HPC) or high throughput computing (HTC) infrastructures, such as those provided by computing grids, they can and do fill an important and growing niche which includes several types of scientific applications. In this regard, the first category comprises desktop applications, i.e. tools which are intended for execution on desktop computers (or enterprise servers) and do not yield themselves easily to parallelization or do not carry requirements characteristic of HPC/HTC systems. This category has expanded significantly over the recent years and will likely continue to grow along with the growing capabilities of desktop solutions (i.e. better processing power, operating memory, network throughput etc.) Additionally, some applications are developed with the intention of being shared within the scientific community. These are predominantly based on the Web application/Representational State Transfer (REST) Services paradigm and provide a means of enabling external users to interact with executable code and scientific datasets in a manner which is suitable both for human users and client software executing in a workflow-like fashion across organizational boundaries. In this paper the authors present their experience with deploying, provisioning and operating a computational cloud platform for the VPH community, set up under the auspices of the VPH-Share project [2]. While the project has concluded, the platform remains in operation and is actively exploited by a growing VPH user community. This community consists of users who were originally partners of the VPH-Share project consortium, as well as additional users brought on board during the course of the project and not originally affiliated with any VPH-Share project partners.