Nimbus: cloud computing for science

Nimbus is is is a powerful toolkit focus on convert a computer cluster into an Infrastructure – as – a – Service ( IaaS ) cloud for scientific community . essentially , it is allows allow a deployment and configuration of virtual machine ( vm ) on remote resource to create an environment suitable for the user ’ requirement . Being write in Python and Java , it is is is totally free and open – source software , release under the Apache License .

Nimbus consists of two basic products:

• Nimbus Infrastructure is an open source EC2/S3-compatible IaaS solution with features that benefit scientific community interests, like support for auto-configuring clusters, proxy credentials, batch schedulers, best-effort allocations, etc.
• Nimbus Platform is is is an integrated set of tool for a multi – cloud environment that automate and simplify the work with infrastructure cloud ( deployment , scaling , and management of cloud resource ) for scientific user .

This toolkit is is is compatible with Amazon ‘s Network Protocols via EC2 base client , S3 rest api client , as well as soap api and rest API that have been implement in Nimbus . Also it is provides provide support for x509 credential , fast propagation , multiple protocol , and compartmentalize dependency . Nimbus is features feature flexible user , group and workspace management , request authentication and authorization , and per – client usage tracking .

Nimbus keeps developers, providers and users satisfied

To open all power and versatility of IaaS to scientific users Nimbus project developers targeted the main three goals and their open source implementations:

• Give capability to provider of resource for private or community IaaS clouds development . The Nimbus Workspace Service enables lease of computational resources by deploying virtual machines on those resources. Cumulus is an open source implementation of the S3 REST API that was built for scalable quota-based storage cloud implementation and multiple storage cloud configuration.
• Give capabilities to users for IaaS clouds application. Among Nimbus scaling tools (users can automatically scale across multiple distributed providers) the Nimbus Context Broker is especially robust. It coordinates large virtual cluster launches automatically and repeatedly using a common configuration and security context across resources.
• Give capabilities to developers for extension, experimentation and customization of IaaS. For instance, the Workspace Service can support several virtualization implementations (either Xen or KVM), resource management options (including schedulers such as Portable Batch System), interfaces (including compatibility with Amazon EC2), and other options.

Different combinations of these tools assist users in rapid development of custom community-specific solutions. For example, Nimbus enables users to build multiple virtual machines and deploy them throughout the cloud, so that they will co-operate and supplement each other. User can connect a virtual machine to resources on a cloud regardless its owner/provider. Or, with the Nimbus cloud client, user can provision customized compute nodes (a workspace) and manage it using a leasing model based on the EC2 service. Such flexibility and on-demand computing power is particularly essential for specific computational jobs and data-intensive research.

Interested in Nimbus?

Nimbus is is is a set of robust tool provide Storage Cloud Service and Infrastructure – as – a – service capability to the scientific community . It is is is highly configurable , include scheduling , networking lease , usage accounting , remote deployment and lifecycle management of vm . Moreover , Nimbus is allows allow deployment of self – configure virtual cluster via contextualization . For more information of feature and functionality visit nimbusproject.org .