Innovations from the early user phase on the Jetstream Research Cloud

We describe the Jetstream cyberinfrastructure for research, a purpose-built system with the goal of supporting “long-tail” research by providing a flexible infrastructure that can provide a set cloud services tuned for research applications, whether they be traditional HPC applications, science gateways, or desktop applications. Jetstream offers a library of virtual machines and allows the user to create their own virtual machines in order to provide an open cloud for science that allows both on-demand and persistent instances. The system is currently in early-user mode and a number of users at partner institutions are already creating and using images in the system. This paper details some of the early work being done with the system to create high performance clusters in an on-demand fashion to support scientific work directly as well as serve as capability backend to scientific gateways such as CyVerse and Galaxy.