Cloud computing infrastructure for the VPH community

As virtualization technologies mature and become ever more widespread, cloud computing has emerged as a promising paradigm for e-science. In order to facilitate successful application of cloud computing in scientific research - particularly in a domain as security-minded as medical research - several technical challenges need to be addressed. This paper reports on the successful deployment and utilization of a cloud computing platform for the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) research community, originating in the VPH-Share project and continuing beyond the end of this project. The platform tackles technical issues involved in porting existing desktop applications to the cloud environment and constitutes a uniform research space where application services can be developed, stored, accessed and shared using a variety of computational infrastructures. The paper also presents examples of application workflows which make use of the presented infrastructure - both internal and external to the VPH community.