StratusLab: Researching Cloud Resource Management and Use

Formed by CNRS/LAL, GRNET, SixSq Sàrl, and UCM, StratusLab is an informal, open collaboration that focuses on the use cloud technologies in research and commercial environments and on the management of cloud resources in those environments.

The key issue with productive use of the technologies is effective management of the cloud resources. For broad adoption, cloud resources must be manageable with the same (or similar) techniques currently used by administrators of data centres. The initial activities of the collaboration will investigate how different management techniques can be adapted to cloud resources.

The first results of the collaboration will be presented in an international event, the joint EGEE User Forum/OGF25 Conference,  March 2-6 in Catania, Italy.  The presentation will describe the initial hurdles--both administrative and technical--in operating an EGEE resource center in the Amazon cloud.  It will also describe initial successes in operating grid services in the cloud as well as using cloud resources to extend computing capabilities of a non-cloud EGEE resource center.

In the future, the collaboration will move on to see how "inner" and "outer" clouds can be integrated. The outer clouds are those currently offered by commercial providers (for example, Amazon Web Services). An inner cloud would be a private data center using cloud technologies to manage it's resources. Seamless integration of the two domains brings unprecedented flexibility to system administrators and to users of the systems. Within research environments, an open source cloud implementation would be necessary.

Link: http://stratuslab.eu