JINR Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud technologies are already wide spread among IT industry and start to gain popularity in academic field. To provide a modern computing facility for JINR users participating in different national and international scientific projects as well as to satisfy the needs of developers (development, testing and debugging various apps in various environments) and system administrators (testing and studying specifics of installation and operation of new apps or verifying updates) a cloud infrastructure was deployed at the Laboratory of Information Technologies of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (LIT JINR). Initially having simple setup with single front-end cloud node and few cluster nodes only it is now transformed into robust powerful cloud platform with front-end core services in high availability configuration distributed over two servers including MySQL data base replicas, and cloud data store based on distributed network file system. Users authentication in cloud web GUI via Kerberos, a custom driver for OpenVZ virtualization support as well as a driver for integration with other private clouds on infrastructure level and visualization of statistics on cloud resources usage have been developed in-house for our own needs. The JINR cloud is used not only by JINR users, developers and system administrators to fulfill JINR commitments in different national and international projects but also as a computing facility in BES-III experiment.