eScience Cloud Infrastructure

Grid computing enables access to high performance computing resources by offering unified interfaces to compute facilities of distributed compute centers. These compute centers are limited in personal capacity and in support capabilities for different communities/VOs. This work presents a solution to this management problem by facilitating the natural interface introduced by virtualization to separate hardware and application provisioning. Any eScience community may provide preconfigured applications within virtual machine images and compute centers run these without having to maintain applications. This is similar to the Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service known from cloud computing. Additionally, in contrast to the state of the art in grid computing, we propose a scalable process to maintain compute resources for scientific users, including the definition of a chain of trust between users and compute centers, which simplifies the addition of communities and resources. As a result, this paper lays the foundation for a next-generation eScience Cloud improving the accessibility of compute resources for research and industry.