Integrating Amazon EC2 with the CMS production framework

Abstract

As cloud middleware and cloud providers have become more robust, various experiments with experience in Grid submission have begun to investigate the possibility of taking previously Grid-Enabled applications and making them compatible with Cloud Computing. Successful implementation will allow for dynamic scaling of the available hardware resources, providing access to peak-load handling capabilities and possibly resulting in lower costs to the experiment. Here we discuss current work within the CMS collaboration at the LHC to both perform computation on EC2, both for production and analysis use-cases. We also discuss break-even points between dedicated and cloud resources using real-world costs derived from a CMS site.