DemoGRAPE: Managing Scientific Applications in a Cloud-Federated Environment

Abstract

There is a strong relationship between scientific research and technology advancement. The former generally focuses on studying phenomena happening in the real world, the latter improves tools that are at the basis of this research. From this perspective, information and communication technologies allow the implementation of ever faster tools for analyzing data generated by experiments. The aim of DemoGRAPE project is to study the interaction of the upper earth atmosphere and the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) signals received at ground, in critical environments such as the polar regions. This paper describes the ICT infrastructure used to manage the software applications used to analyzed data collected during project experimental campaigns, taking into account the following constraints: (i) the intellectual property of the applications must be protected, (ii) the underlying infrastructure resembles a cloud-federation, (iii) data are over-sized, (iv) provide a unified vision of the available resources to the user (i.e., what are the available applications, and where experimental data reside). Leveraging on a lightweight virtualization system, we proposed a management system that copes with all these four constraints. A case study is used to show the process of deploying an application through the proposed system on a specific node where data of interest reside.