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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