Execution of Scientific Workflows on Federated Multi-cloud Infrastructures

Recently cloud services have been evaluated by scientific communities as a viable solution to satisfy their computing needs, reducing the cost of ownership and operation to the minimum. The analysis on the adoption of the cloud computing model for eScience has identified several areas of improvement as federation management and interoperability between providers. Portability between cloud vendors is a widely recognized feature to avoid the risk of lock-in of users in proprietary systems, a stopper to the complete adoption of clouds. In this paper we present a programming framework that allows the coordination of applications on federated clouds used to provide flexibility to traditional research infrastructures as clusters and grids. This approach allows researchers to program applications abstracting the underlying infrastructure and providing scaling and elasticity features through the dynamic provision of virtualized resources. The adoption of standard interfaces is a basic feature in the development of connectors for different middlewares ensuring the portability of the code between different providers.