CernVM Co-Pilot: a Framework for Orchestrating Virtual Machines Running Applications of LHC Experiments on the Cloud

CernVM Co-Pilot is a framework for the delivery and execution of the workload on remote computing resources. It consists of components which are developed to ease the integration of geographically distributed resources (such as commercial or academic computing clouds, or the machines of users participating in volunteer computing projects) into existing computing grid infrastructures. The Co-Pilot framework can also be used to build an ad-hoc computing infrastructure on top of distributed resources. In this paper we present the architecture of the Co-Pilot framework, describe how it is used to execute the jobs of the ALICE and ATLAS experiments, as well as to run the Monte-Carlo simulation application of CERN Theoretical Physics Group.