CESGA - Virtual Clusters on Federated Cloud Sites with BonFIRE

Added-value of the BonFIRE infrastructure
BonFIRE facilities are unique in the Cloud field. They provide capabilities that are difficult to implement locally by small research centres or SMEs, where their software can be tested and new concepts can be experimented. Although deploying open software stacks for cloud inside one organisation is relatively easy, making a stable and productive infrastructure for cloud experiments is still complex and consumes a lot of effort. Using commercial cloud for this kind of experiments, where the infrastructure is shared with production and isolation level is not always guaranteed, since it is a problem to make some experiments where the factors must be controlled in order to get right conclusions.

This experiment needs some of the BonFIRE unique capabilities: the multi-site environment. The experiment focused on gathering very valuable information about how to deploy and manage virtual clusters that can use several sites and the influence of requesting several deployments simultaneously. A testbed where the experimenter can control network parameters such as bandwidth, latency or errors. This facility will allow the experimenter to study the effects of the network in the deployment and management of a virtual distributed cluster.

Impact on the BonFIRE project
This experiment used most of the components of the BonFIRE infrastructure, and will help to improve the final user experience. A large number of new requirements have been requested to the project, which are being implemented and deployed. Also, due to the fact that the experiment will measure the time to deploy and enlarge a set of machines, BonFIRE benefits from using this information to detect any bottlenecks.