Sciinterface:a Web-Based Job Submission Mechanism for Scientific Cloud Computing

Scientific Cloud Computing has emerged rapidly in the last few years. Scientific Cloud Computing, which targets high performance communities, has caused a shift over of the scientific applications running on conventional physical infrastructure to a more scalable and flexible virtual infrastructure managed by the cloud providers. Scientific Cloud Computing has brought up a lot of advantages (pay-per-use, resource on-demand, high-availability, flexibility, scalability) over the traditional computing models. Traditional computing models, in order to use scientific applications, require in-house infrastructure (servers, storage etc.) and skill to manage this infrastructure, whereas the Scientific Cloud Computing allows the user to focus on applications without worrying about the infrastructure and installations required. Scientific clouds need proper access mechanisms to improve the adoption of such facilities by scientific communities and enhance the usage of scientific clouds. It is very important to have a proper access mechanism in place for Scientific Clouds so as to improve the adoption of such facilities and enhance the usage of cloud. In this paper, the authors present a Web-Based Job Submission Mechanism for Scientific Cloud Computing, SciInterface. SciInterface provides a graphical user-friendly interface to the users for interacting with the Scientific Cloud and a facility to submit scientific jobs in to the cloud for processing. The prominent features of SciInterface are user privileges mapping, job submission, job monitoring and output logs. The authors, in this paper, discuss the architecture and features of SciInterface, along with the challenges faced during the development.