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 the first release of the grid User Support Environment (gUSE) providing access to cloud infrastructures by incorporating an interface to the CloudBroker Platform.
A framework of high-level services to achieve interoperation between distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) and user communities, gUSE’s WS-PGRADE web portal provides scientific workflow management for both application developers and end users. Additionally, it supports various DCIs including clusters, service grids, desktop grids and cloud.
The CloudBroker Platform is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application store that enables the use of compute-intensive applications on different cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. It can be accessed via a web browser or programmatically and is available in public pay-per-use as well as hosted or in-house versions.
Together, gUSE and the CloudBroker Platform build the technological basis for the SCI-BUS EU FP7 project. Scientific gateways for a number of different communities, including proteomics, molecular science, seismology, business processes, medicine, rendering, astrophysics, SMEs, software testing, citizen web and heliophysics, are being built on top of this generic-purpose technology.
The new gUSE release incorporates major results of the collaboration of MTA SZTAKI and CloudBroker within the SCI-BUS project. The resulting features include selection possibilities for application software and cloud resources during job creation, configuration of one or more CloudBroker Platform installations as DCIs, and the use of an existing or new CloudBroker Platform user account. Further features, such as cost display, will be included in forthcoming releases of gUSE.
To use the new cloud facilities within gUSE, access to an installation of the CloudBroker Platform is needed. An account for the platform’s public version can be obtained by registering at https://platform.cloudbroker.com.
