Lightweight Scheduling for the PRAGMA Cloud Testbed

The Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) is a community of research scientists and institutions from around the Pacific Rim that work together to enable scientific expeditions in areas such as biodiversity distribution and lake ecology. PRAGMA’s members collaborate on a testbed infrastructure and over the past four years, the technology focus has shifted to cloud and software defined networking as enabling technologies. This short paper describes the design of a web-based cloud scheduler reservation system that will enable users to easily run and manage virtual clusters for their science. Based on a client-server architecture, the cloud scheduler was designed so that it requires minimal installation and and management effort for participating PRAGMA testbed sites. The PRAGMA cloud scheduler is built using a web-based room reservation tool called Booked and leverages several PRAGMA technologies such as pragma boot, Personal Cloud Controller, and virtual network overlays (e.g., IPOP, ViNe). We discuss our implementation of the pilot cloud scheduler and then describe future work.