A Platform to Deploy Customized Scientific Virtual Infrastructures on the Cloud

This paper presents a software platform to dynamically deploy complex scientific virtual computing infrastructures, on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. The platform orchestrates different services to provision the virtual computing resources. It dynamically installs the appropriate software to satisfy the requirements of a researcher, both on public and on-premise Clouds. The paper also describes two case studies to deploy complex infrastructures such as a Hadoop cluster on which to execute the BLAST biomedical application or single-node infrastructures with a very specific installation and configuration process to perform NGS sequencing. This platform promotes a better use of on-premise hardware resources of a research center by allocating the computing resources just-in-time to the specific life time of the virtual infrastructures.