Implementation and use of a highly available and innovative IaaS solution: the Cloud Area Padovana

While in the business world the cloud paradigm is typically implemented purchasing resources and services from third party providers (e.g. Amazon), in the scientific environment there's usually the need of on-premises IaaS infrastructures which allow efficient usage of the hardware distributed among (and owned by) different scientific administrative domains. In addition, the requirement of open source adoption has led to the choice of products like OpenStack by many organizations. We describe a use case of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) which resulted in the implementation of a unique cloud service, called ’Cloud Area Padovana’, which encompasses resources spread over two different sites: the INFN Legnaro National Laboratories and the INFN Padova division. We describe how this IaaS has been implemented, which technologies have been adopted and how services have been configured in high-availability (HA) mode. We also discuss how identity and authorization management were implemented, adopting a widely accepted standard architecture based on SAML2 and OpenID: by leveraging the versatility of those standards the integration with authentication federations like IDEM was implemented. We also discuss some other innovative developments, such as a pluggable scheduler, implemented as an extension of the native OpenStack scheduler, which allows the allocation of resources according to a fair-share based model and which provides a persistent queuing mechanism for handling user requests that can not be immediately served. Tools, technologies, procedures used to install, configure, monitor, operate this cloud service are also discussed. Finally we present some examples that show how this IaaS infrastructure is being used

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE GLITE CREAM JOB MANAGEMENT SERVICE

Job execution and management is one of the most important functionality provided by every modern Grid middleware. In this paper we describe how the problem of job management has been addressed in the gLite middleware by means of the CREAM and CEMonitor services. CREAM (Computing Resource Execution and Management) provides a job execution and management capability for Grid systems, while CEMonitor is a generalpurpose asynchronous event notification framework. Both services expose a Web Service interface allowing conforming clients to submit, manage and monitor computational jobs to a Local Resource Management System. PACS: 89.20.Ff Computer Science and Technology Published by SIS-Pubblicazion