JINR CLOUD SERVICE FOR SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING COMPUTATIONS

Abstract

Pretty often small research scientific groups do not have access to powerful enough computational resources required for their research work to be productive. Global computational infrastructures used by large scientific collaborations can be challenging for small research teams because of bureaucracy overhead as well as usage complexity of underlying tools. Some researchers buy a set of powerful servers to cover their own needs in computational resources. A drawback of such approach is a necessity to take care about proper hosting environment for these hardware and maintenance which requires a certain level of expertise. Moreover a lot of time such resources may be underutilized because а researcher needs to spend a certain amount of time to prepare computations and to analyze results as well as he doesn’t always need all resources of modern multi-core CPUs servers. The JINR cloud team developed a service which provides an access for scientists of small research groups from JINR and its Member State organizations to computational resources via problem-oriented (i.e. application-specific) web-interface. It allows a scientist to focus on his research domain by interacting with the service in a convenient way via browser and abstracting away from underlying infrastructure as well as its maintenance. A user just sets a required values for his job via web-interface and specify a location for uploading a result. The computational workloads are done on the virtual machines deployed in the JINR cloud infrastructure.

Keywords

• Cloud technologies
• software as a service
• web-application
• data center
• virtualization
• virtual machine
• software-defined storage