Scientific computing applications usually need huge amounts of computational power. The cloud provides interesting high-performance computing solutions, with its promise of virtually infinite resources on demand. However, migrating scientific computing problems to clouds and the re-creation of software environment on the vendor-supplied OS and cloud instances is often a laborious task. It is also assumed that the scientist who is performing the experiments has significant knowledge of computer science, cloud computing and the migration procedure, which is often not true. Considering these obstacles, we have designed a tool suite that migrates the complete software environment directly to the cloud. The developed desktop-to-cloud-migration (D2CM) tool supports transformation and migration of virtual machine images, reusable deployment description and life-cycle management for applications to be hosted on Amazon Cloud or compatible infrastructure such as Eucalyptus. The paper also presents an electrochemical case study and computational experiments targeted at designing modern supercapacitors. These experiments have extensively used the tool in drawing domain specific results. Detailed analysis of the case showed that D2CM tool not only simplifies the migration procedure for the scientists, but also helps them in optimizing the calculations and compute clusters, by providing them a new dimension -- cost-to-value of computational experiments.
The recent developments in virtualization change completely the panorama of the Hardware OS deployment. New bottlenecks arise in the deployment of application stacks, where IT industry will spend most of the time to assure automation. VIRTU tool aims at managing, configuring and testing distributed ground applications of space systems on a virtualized environment, based on open tools and cross virtualization support. This tool is a spin-off of previous activities performed by the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) and thus it covers the original needs from the ground data systems infrastructure division of the European Space Agency. VIRTU is a testing oriented solution. Its ability to group several virtual machines in an assembly provides the means to easily deploy a full testing infrastructure, including the client server relationships. The possibility of making on-demand request of the testing infrastructure will provide some infrastructure optimizations, specially having in mind that ESA maintains Ground Control software of various missions, and each mission cam potentially have a different set of System baselines and last up to 15 years. The matrix array of supported system combinations is therefore enormous and any improvement on the process provides substantial benefits to ESA, by reducing the effort and schedule of each maintenance activity. The ESOC's case study focuses on the development and validation activities of infrastructure or mission Ground Systems solutions. The Ground Systems solutions are typically composed of distributed systems that could take advantage of virtualized environments for testing purposes. Virtualization is used as way to optimize maintenance for tasks such as testing new releases and patches, test different system's configurations and replicate tests. The main benefits identified are related to deployment test environment and the possibility to have on-demand infrastructure.