StratusLab - Enhancing Grid Infrastructures with Cloud Computing

StratusLab is a research initiative aimed at exploring the integration of cloud technologies and services, especially virtualisation, into existing Grid Infrastructures. Hybrid platforms combining aspects of Grid and Cloud technologies would offer advantages both to resource providers and to end-users. Using cloud technologies for resource provisioning would enhance failover and redundancy solutions, provide “elastic” sites able to expand available resources, and permit machine migration for flexible load balancing. The underlying virtualization would allow end-users to tailor their computing environment to avoid failures from misconfigured systems or from insufficient allocations of, for example, disk and memory. Grid technologies would continue to provide the glue to federate the distributed resources and the services for high-level job and data management. Equally, the provision of IaaS delivery paradigms in addition to existing Grid services would attract the science user communities and industrial users that have embraced the cloud computing provisioning model. Cloud-like interfaces would providing a new way to access to the same underlying Grid site infrastructure without replacing the Grid functionality.