The Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI), CloudBroker, and the Scientific gateway Based User Support (SCI-BUS) project have announced new versions of the two SCI-BUS base technologies, WSPGRADE/ gUSE and the CloudBroker Platform, which together extend cloud access for science gateways.
WS-PGRADE/gUSE is an open source framework to build community gateways based on Liferay. It provides scientific workflow management for application developers and end users, and supports various distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) including clusters, grids and clouds.
For cloud access, it uses the CloudBroker Platform, an application store for offering and running compute-intensive applications on public and private cloud infrastructures. The platform widely automates resource and software handling, job execution as well as user accounting and billing, and can be accessed as a service both through the web as well as programmatically.
Thanks to the new WS-PGRADE/gUSE 3.5.4 release and the recent CloudBroker Platform updates to version 1.1.4.7, adopters of the SCI-BUS technology can now provide a complete set of services for those of their users who would like to run workflows on cloud systems instead of or in addition to grid systems.
Only a few clicks are needed to reconfigure the existing WSPGRADE/gUSE workflows, and they will run on open-source and free cloud resources. With the customisation methodologies provided by WS-PGRADE/gUSE, users are able to exploit clouds without even being aware of using them.
With the new WS-PGRADE/gUSE release, users get a cleaner portal interface and optimised data and virtual machine image handling, hidden from the users. Both Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud usage models are now supported, that is, not only pre-registered applications, but also applications provided by the users during workflow configuration can be run.
Besides the already earlier supported commercial cloud resources (Amazon Web Services and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise) and open source cloud tools (OpenStack and Eucalyptus), the CloudBroker Platform incorporates a new adapter to clouds based on OpenNebula. Different Amazon S3-compatible storage solutions can now also be used (OpenStack and Ceph RADOS), and platform usability and performance have been further improved.
