The Integration of CloudStack and OCCI/OpenNebula with DIRAC

Abstract

The increasing availability of Cloud resources is arising as a realistic alternative to the Grid as a paradigm for enabling scientific communities to access large distributed computing resources. The DIRAC framework for distributed computing is an easy way to efficiently access to resources from both systems. This paper explains the integration of DIRAC with two open-source Cloud Managers: OpenNebula (taking advantage of the OCCI standard) and CloudStack. These are computing tools to manage the complexity and heterogeneity of distributed data center infrastructures, allowing to create virtual clusters on demand, including public, private and hybrid clouds. This approach has required to develop an extension to the previous DIRAC Virtual Machine engine, which was developed for Amazon EC2, allowing the connection with these new cloud managers. In the OpenNebula case, the development has been based on the CernVM Virtual Software Appliance with appropriate contextualization, while in the case of CloudStack, the infrastructure has been kept more general, which permits other Virtual Machine sources and operating systems being used. In both cases, CernVM File System has been used to facilitate software distribution to the computing nodes. With the resulting infrastructure, the cloud resources are transparent to the users through a friendly interface, like the DIRAC Web Portal.The main purpose of this integration is to get a system that can manage cloud and grid resources at the same time. This particular feature pushes DIRAC to a new conceptual denomination as interware, integrating different middleware. Users from different communities do not need to care about the installation of the standard software that is available at the nodes, nor the operating system of the host machine which is transparent to the user. This paper presents an analysis of the overhead of the virtual layer, doing some tests to compare the proposed approach with the existing Grid solution.License Notice: Published under licence in Journal of Physics: Conference Series by IOP Publishing Ltd.