Cloudbroker achieves major milestone in EU project

The Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI), CloudBroker GmbH, and the SCIentific gateway Based User Support (SCI-BUS) project are happy to announce the first release of the grid User Support Environment (gUSE) providing access to cloud infrastructures by incorporating an interface to the CloudBroker Platform.
 
Prof. Dr. Peter Kacsuk, head of the Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems (LPDS) at MTA SZTAKI and SCI-BUS project coordinator, states: “With the gUSE interface to the CloudBroker Platform, users can now easily access applications in the cloud as part of their workflows. This will put cloud computing much more into the reach of both scientific gateway providers as well as the scientists themselves.” Dr. Wibke Sudholt, CTO of CloudBroker and work package leader in SCI-BUS, agrees: “Running jobs via the CloudBroker Platform offers an alternative for gUSE users who do not have their own cluster or grid infrastructure. The underlying pay-per-use model is particularly attractive for temporary or peak usage, and for the commercial utilization of scientific workflows.”
 
gUSE is a framework of high-level services to achieve interoperation between distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) and user communities. Its web portal provides scientific workflow management for both application developers and end users, and supports various DCIs including clusters, service grids, desktop grids and cloud.
 
The CloudBroker Platform is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application store that allows easily offering and using compute-intensive applications on different cloud infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. It can be accessed via a web browser or programmatically, and is available in public pay-per-use as well as hosted or in-house versions.
 
Together, gUSE and the CloudBroker Platform build the technological basis for the SCI-BUS EU FP7 project. Here, scientific gateways for a number of different communities, including proteomics, molecular science, seismology, business processes, medicine, rendering, astrophysics, SMEs, software testing, citizen web and heliophysics, are being built on top of this generic-purpose technology.
 
The new gUSE release is the first one that incorporates major results of the collaboration of MTA SZTAKI and CloudBroker within the SCI-BUS project.
 
CloudBroker (http://www.cloudbroker.com) founded in 2008, is a spin-off company of the ETH Zurich located in Zurich, Switzerland. It offers scientific and technical applications as a service in the cloud, for usage in fields such as biology, chemistry, health and engineering. Its flagship product, the CloudBroker Platform, provides immediate and pay-per-use web access to application software as well as compute and storage resources in the cloud at the same time.
 
SCI-BUS (http://www.sci-bus.eu) is a European project supported by the FP7 Capacities Programme under contract no. RI-283481. It aims at developing gateway technology and community gateways to provide researchers seamless access to major computing, data and networking infrastructures and services, with focus on scientific workflows. SCI-BUS is a collaboration of 15 consortium members and six subcontractors, supporting 17 gateways in various disciplines.