Cloudspace: Virtual Environments in the VO

Abstract

The grid community is moving towards providing on-demand computing in the form of virtual workspaces - abstracted execution environments that are dynamically made available to authorized clients. In part this is a reaction to market forces represented by such commercial initiatives as Amazon EC2 and in part a solution to hot service deployment. One danger, though, is that a multiplicity of implementations will lead to a lack of interoperability. Such a concern in the VO regarding distributed data storage led to the development of VOSpace, a lightweight abstraction layer that sits on top of existing storage solutions such as SRB. In this paper, we introduce Cloudspace, a resource-oriented extension of VOSpace, that incorporates UWS, the VO pattern for managing asynchronous services, to form a natural habitat for virtual environments in the VO. A notable feature of the Cloudspace concept is that distributed data and computing can be managed seamlessly through a single mechanism thus making the astronomer’s life easier as we move into a new era of sophisticated computational astronomy.