Virtual workspaces for scientific applications
Kate Keahey, Tim Freeman, Jérôme Lauret, Doug Olson · Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2007
Scientists often face the need for more computing power than is available locally, but are constrained by the fact that even if the required resources were available remotely, their complex software stack would not be easy to port to those resources. Many applications are dependency-rich and complex, making it hard to run them on anything but a dedicated platform. Worse, even if the applications do run on another system, the results they produce may not be consistent across different runs. As part of the Center for Enabling Distributed Petascale Science (CEDPS) project we have been developing the workspace service which allows authorized clients to dynamically provision execution environments, using virtual machine technology, on remote computers. Virtual machines provide an excellent implementation of a portable environment as they allow users to configure an environment and then deploy it on a variety of platforms. This paper describes a proof-of-concept of this strategy developed for the High-Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) applications such as STAR's. We are currently building on this work to enable production STAR runs in virtual machines.