An elastic virtual infrastructure for research applications (ELVIRA)

Abstract

Cloud computing infrastructures provide a way for researchers to source the computational and storage resources they require to conduct their work and to collaborate within distributed research teams. We provide an overview of a cloud-based elastic virtual infrastructure for research applications that we have established to provide researchers with a collaborative research environment that automatically allocates cloud resources as required. We describe how we have used this infrastructure to support research on the Sun’s corona and how the elasticity provided by cloud infrastructures can be leveraged to provide high-throughput computing resources using a set of off-the-shelf technologies and a small number of additional tools that are simple to deploy and use. The resulting infrastructure has a number of advantages for the researchers compared to traditional clusters or grid computing environments that we discuss in the conclusions.