Science gateways made easy: the In‐VIGO approach

Abstract

SUMMARYScience gateways require the easy enabling of legacy scientific applications on computing Grids and the generation of user-friendly interfaces that hide the complexity of the Grid from the user. This paper presents the In-VIGO approach to the creation and management of science gateways. First, we discuss the virtualization of machines, networks and data to facilitate the dynamic creation of secure execution environments that meet application requirements. Then we discuss the virtualization of applications, i.e. the execution on shared resources of multiple isolated application instances with customized behavior, in the context of In-VIGO. A Virtual Application Service (VAS) architecture for automatically generating, customizing, deploying, and using virtual applications as Grid services is then described. Starting with a grammar-based description of the command-line syntax, the automated process generates the VAS description and the VAS implementation (code for application encapsulation and data binding) that is deployed and made available through a Web interface. A VAS can be customized on a per-user basis by restricting the capabilities of the original application or by adding to it features such as parameter sweeping. This is a scalable approach to the integration of scientific applications as services into Grids and can be applied to any tool with an arbitrarily complex command-line syntax.

Virtualization technologies in transnational DG

“…In addition, as exemplified by middleware developed by the authors to create Virtual Applications Services [9], VAs benefits includea also the following:…”

Controlling the Deployment of Virtual Machines on Clusters and Clouds for Scientific Computing in CBRAIN

“…At the infrastructure level, hardware virtualization has been used to provision virtual clusters on grids as early as 2003 [13], and was later on exploited in systems such as VMPlant [14], In-VIGO [15], Condor [16] and GridWay [17]. This last system encapsulates virtual machines in grid jobs to reuse parts of the grid middleware, a solution that we reuse in CBRAIN (see our second design principle in Section III).…”

Cost-effective cloud HPC resource provisioning by building semi-elastic virtual clusters

“…Virtual Clusters Constructing virtual clusters with grid-based virtual machines has been proposed by Figueiredo et al [10] and researchers also implemented such systems, such as In-VIGO [27] and VMPlants [22]. Although they share the on-demand nature with cloud-based clusters, grid virtual clusters were designed to use distributed parallel platforms (mostly for running throughput-oriented applications).…”