Private clouds for research and education using open source tools

From Fosscomm Thessaloniki 2010

In Ubuntu 9.04, Canonical introduced the possibility of running private clouds, offering immediacy and elasticity in one's own IT infrastructure. Using Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) organizations can experience the benefits of cloud computing within their own servers running virtual machines: to deploy workloads and have them running immediately; to grow or shrink computing capacity to meet the needs of a demanding application, etc. With UEC offering the same APIs as the dominant public cloud offering, Amazon EC2, applications can be built to run on either platform thus offering a (theoretically) infinite expansion potential. In this presentation/workshop we will explore the impact and prospects of this promising technology in research and education, and we will present examples already deployed in the Department of Financial and Management Engineering of the University of the Aegean. We will also present our modifications of StarCluster (a utility originally created in MIT for managing general purpose computing clusters hosted on Amazon's EC2) in order to make it compatible with UEC. StarCluster minimizes the administrative overhead associated with obtaining, configuring, and managing a traditional computing cluster used in research labs or for general distributed computing applications. Our modification of StarCluster completely automates the process of creating a high performance computing cluster on UEC. This involves requesting virtual machines from the UEC server, configuring the cluster with Sun Grid Engine, OpenMPI, passwordless SSH, NFS shared /home and /opt directories, and ~140GB of /scratch space.