Our project has three quite different goals:
- build a private cloud
- deploy the Canadian Space Science Data Portal in a cloud, and
- run simulations in a cloud.
In our initial plans, it seemed obvious and necessary that we must first build the cloud before deploying anything in it. This is rather dangerous, as there is little for users to see until very late in the project, when it is difficult to react. We very much wanted to show visible progress to our users as early as possible, and use their comments to guide our work. Upon reflection, we realised that we could achieve this if we split our project into two independent tracks.
One project track will focus on the establishment of a multi-node, geographically distributed, private cloud. This work will allow us to fully understand the costs of owning and operating a private cloud, and to deal with the myriad technical and organisational issues that are involved. The private cloud will be fully compatible with the commercial cloud, so moving from the commercial cloud to the private cloud will be fairly simple
The other project track would focus on deploying the data portal and running simulations in an Amazon commercial cloud. This work will produce visible results much, much sooner than otherwise possible, giving our physics researchers an early opportunity to guide the direction of our work. This work will also allow us to assess the costs of using a commercial cloud, allowing us to make an informed comparison to the private cloud.
In fact, we have already begun. Our first result is here. It is admittedly trivial, but it is a real simulation running on a ‘real’ virtual server, and we learned a lot during it’s construction, both technically and in terms of usability.
We have also been considering exactly how the simulation platform should integrate with the Data Portal. Our original assumption was that the simulation platform would simply be a tightly integrated extension of the Data Portal. Lately we’ve been wondering if some other arrangement would be better. Some users are vitally interested in data, and not at all interested in the simulations. Other users want to make use of the simulations, but don’t care about the observational data. We will need to consider the various use cases more carefully to decide this issue, and to do this, we will have to listen what the users –of both the Data Portal and the Simulation Platform– have to say.
Over the next few weeks, we will continue our early work with the simulation platform. After that, our next goal will likely be the deployment of the Data Portal into an Amazon cloud.
