Distributed Cloud Development for e-Science

The e-Science infrastructure is established to accelerate scientific discovery and innovation by integrating global resource federation and collaboration. The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) is the perfect example of advantages of immense scalability and multidisciplinary collaborations. Meanwhile, Cloud technology is expected to reduce the cost of exploiting research infrastructure and minimize the effort of data and IT management for the scientific community. In this research, ASGC integrated the service-oriented Cloud technology with the WLCG and built the ASGC Distributed Cloud so that wider range of services and more delicate customization for eScience applications can be supported. For Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the site level virtual infrastructure management was established, together with the sharable repositories of virtual machine images and virtual appliances. And for Platform as a Service (PaaS) which enables easy reconfiguration of sharable services and tools according to different research workflows, ASGC developed the Grid Application Platform (GAP). It is composed of generic domain toolkits and interfaces for underlying distributed infrastructure and is also used in supporting platform level web portal development. Currently in ASGC Distributed Cloud, the on-demand services are available through thousands of virtual machines with the performance of reaching 98% of the physical machine when being used in running e-Science applications. ASGC will continue to enhance the Distributed Cloud for e-Science and work on decreasing the cost and effort of data management, elevating the performance, advancing the intelligent adaptive mechanism, and supporting the sustainability.