## Scientific cloud for academic community As a part of a joint effort, CESNET and CERIT-SC provide an IaaS cloud service for academic use. This venture was motivated by the need to react to requirements from user communities with an increased flexibility. In most cases, it allows for provisioning of highly specialised worker nodes for scientific computing applications, and acts as a new interface to existing NGI resources. Therefore an evaluation in terms of cost is not the primary goal, cost cutting is not the reason for deploying a cloud in this environment. The primary focus is the support of new and more diverse user communities. The scientific cloud infrastructure provides users with two essential services. The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud for launching virtual machines and The Storage as a Service (STaaS) cloud for file-based storage and file sharing. ### IaaS The IaaS cloud infrastructure at CESNET/CERIT-SC is based on OpenNebula an open source cloud management framework, which has been extended and integrated with various pre-existing NGI services such as: * Accounting (MetaAcct) * Monitoring (PBSMon, Nagios monitoring probes for OpenNebula) * User management (The Perun management system) * Authentication and authorization (Kerberos and X.509) In general, it is used to run on-demand nodes with user-supplied images as well as worker nodes for the national grid environment. As a leader of the virtual machine management activity in the context of the EGI Federated Cloud, we are focusing on standardization and interoperability while providing several components used in various places of the federated cloud ecosystem. Most notably, the rOCCI framework implementing the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) in Ruby and providing both client-side and server-side ready-to-use products. ### STaaS CESNET has its own storage service providing storage and archiving capacity for grid and cloud users alike via standardized protocols such as FTP or NFS. One of several ways to use this large storage capacity is the OwnCloud-based STaaS generally available for end users. ## Outcome The aforementioned services create a solid foundation for a scientific HPC cloud which has proven to be an efficien tool for supporting new and existing user communities with a considerable increase in flexibility. Similar trends are also emerging in the European e-Infrastructure as demonstrated by the EGI Federated Cloud effort and its recent move to production. As a result of the participation in multiple international cloud-oriented projects and internal efforts, we can share our technical expertise on a plethora of subjects including but not limited to interoperability, infrastructure design and management, user management and AAI. |