e-Science Central: Cloud-based e-Science and its application to chemical property modelling

This paper describes the design of a cloud computing platform e-Science Central (eSC) which provides both Software and Platform as a Service for scientific data management, analysis and collaboration. e-SC can be deployed on both private (e.g. Eucalyptus) and public Clouds (Amazon AWS and Microsoft Windows Azure). The SaaS application allows scientists to upload data, edit and run workflows, and share results in the cloud. It is underpinned by a scalable cloud platform consisting of a set of services designed to support the needs of scientists. The platform is exposed to developers so that they can easily upload their own analysis services into the system and make these available to other users. A REST-based API is also provided so that external applications can leverage the platform’s functionality. This paper describes the design of e-SC, focusing on its exploitation of clouds. Its usage is demonstrated by a description of a recent project in which it was used for chemical modeling by cancer researchers. © 2010 University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Printed and published by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Computing Science, Claremont Tower, Claremont Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England. Bibliographical details HIDEN, H., WATSON, P., WOODMAN, S., LEAHY, D. e-Science Central: Cloud-based e-Science and its application to chemical property modelling [By] H. Hiden, P. Watson, S. Woodman and D. Leahy Newcastle upon Tyne: University of Newcastle upon Tyne: Computing Science, 2010. (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Computing Science, Technical Report Series, No. CS-TR-1227)