SaaS Clouds Supporting Biology and Medicine - Cloud Computing with e-Science Applications - page 249

11.4 Research Cloud Prototype
A prototype of the proposed cloud framework was developed by integrating
three components: (1) Amazon EC2 (public IaaS cloud), which provides HPC
infrastructure; (2) an HPC service software library (Church, Wong, Brock,
and Goscinski 2012) for accessing HPC resources from an IaaS cloud; and
(3) an application broker as a web-based platform (Uncinus) for accessing
and exposing HPC applications.

11.4.1 Prototype Overview

The overview of the prototype design demonstrating the relationships
among the Amazon EC2 service, the HPC software library, and the applica-
tion broker, is shown in Figure 11.3. Also shown in Figure 11.3 is our view
of the cloud service stack where different cloud services would be found.
At the bottom (IaaS) layer, the Amazon EC2 was used to provide cloud
infrastructure services. Supported HPC applications are installed in virtual
machines, and their images are saved and stored in Amazon EC2.
In the middle (high-performance computing as a service, HPCaaS) layer,
an HPC software library was developed to expose and access Amazon EC2
services. The software library provides users a higher level of HPC services,
such as constructing and managing computer clusters. A web form exposes
the operations of the HPC software library, allowing the user to start cloud
jobs (selecting the type and amount of resources that are required) and

Cloud Service Stack

SaaS Layer

HPC Application Service

HPC
Application
API

Exposed as

Web Form

To ols

Application
Broker

To ols

HPC Service

HPC
Software
Library

Exposed as

Web Form

HPCaaS Layer

Amazon EC2 Service

HPC
Application

VM
Image

IaaS Layer

FIGURE 11.3
Implementation overview of HPC cloud framework.