Enabling and sharing storage space under a federated cloud environment

Abstract

To support the Portuguese scientific community LIP, Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de Partículas, has been operating a high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure under a grant from the Infraestrutura Nacional de Computação Distribuída (INCD) Program. Now, LIP is promoting another initiative towards the same community, that is, to build a Cloud Computing (CC) service which orchestrates the three fundamental resources: compute, network, and storage. The main goal of this dissertation is to research, implement, benchmark and adopt the most appropriate backend storage architecture for the OpenStack cloud computing software service, chosen by LIP (following EGI, the European Grid Infrastructure) to be the cloud platform to be deployed in the new CC-INCD program. For this work, our objectives are: a) to gain an understanding of OpenStack – its architecture, and the way it works to offer an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform; b) look for candidates suitable to be deployed as OpenStack’ storage backends, which should be able to store templates (images, in the OpenStack terminology) of virtual machines (VMs) and ISO images (CDs/DVDs), ephemeral and persistent virtual disks for VM instances, etc.; c) to present a preliminary study of three file systems that are strong candidates to be integrated with OpenStack: NFS, Ceph and GlusterFS; and, d) to choose a candidate to integrate with OpenStack, and perform an experimental evaluation.