Speaker
Description
DIRAC is a widely used "framework for distributed computing". It works by providing a layer between users and computing resources by offering a common interface to a number of heterogeneous resource providers. DIRAC originally provided support for dynamic workload management on a cloud via its VMDIRAC extension. When the VMDIRAC extension was envisaged, it was common to use commercial clouds via reservations and the design of the project reflected this. The VMDIRAC code itself was developed as a self-contained plugin, duplicating a significant amount of code from the core DIRAC project which then needed maintaining separately.
With experience, the modern usage of clouds within the DIRAC communities is primarily targeted at research rather than commercial clouds; this allows us to approach the cloud resources in a similar manner to a grid resource. The existing DIRAC infrastructure can be used directly, significantly reducing the amount of code duplication. Instead of the previous internal VMDIRAC specific cloud interface modules, we now use the standard Apache libcloud library as the back-end cloud interface. This has the further advantage that any updates we make to libcloud benefit a much wider community and in turn DIRAC also benefits from any progress in libcloud. In this talk we describe our implementation, the difficulties encountered and the subsequent production deployment of this new cloud resource interface.
| Consider for long presentation | No |
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