Science Clouds » Uncategorized http://scienceclouds.org A community driven website devoted to on demand infrastructure for scientific communities Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:12:08 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 Science Cloud 2011 http://scienceclouds.org/blog/science-cloud-2011/ http://scienceclouds.org/blog/science-cloud-2011/#comments Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:10:16 +0000 John Bresnahan http://scienceclouds.org/?p=717 I had the privilege of presenting Cumulus: Open Source Storage Cloud for  Science at the Science Cloud 2011 workshop yesterday.  While I was focused on our open source S3 implementation ideal for the extensibility and scientific experimentation, many other interesting topics were presented. Shane Canon present a very interesting look at common misconceptions about the cloud in scientific circles.  In it he exposed some truths about what ‘on demand’ ultimately means to a data center.  He worked to illustrate where on the hype curve the cloud currently is, and what features work for science and what was missing.  Elasticity for bursty applications is a clear win but a sighted glaring gap is the lack of a shared file system.  A shared file system is an assumed service to most scientific users coming from the grid and most other HPC platforms.  This need for a shared file system struck a chord with me and it seemed to be a common theme at the workshop.  Lavanya Ramakrishnan gave a talk on Magellan: Experiences from a Science Cloud.  In it she mentioned the struggles scientific users had with their applications inside of VMs.  One was the difficulty staging in data into the VM’s space.  A couple of other talks discussed the huge volumes of data created by scientific applications. All of this discussion made me wonder if a Cloud agnostic shared file system service could be created and if such a thing could solve these problems.

The full program is available here.

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