Nimbus – cloud computing for science

Last Updated on January 21, 2024

Nimbus is an open-source toolkit that, once installed on a cluster, provides an infrastructure as a service cloud to its client via WSRF-based or Amazon EC2 WSDL web service APIs. The mission of the software is to evolve the infrastructure with emphasis on the needs of science, but many non-scientific use cases are supported as well.

Nimbus supports the Xen hypervisor or KVM and virtual machine schedulers PBS and SGE. It allows deployment of self-configured virtual clusters via contextualization. It is configurable with respect to scheduling, networking leases, and usage accounting.

Nimbus clients can deploy, pause, restart and shutdown VMs.

Features include:

• Storage cloud implementation called Cumulus that has been tightly integrated with the other central services.
• Cumulus is compatible with the Amazon Web Services S3 REST API.
• Intuitive Cloud client – the workspace cloud client allows authorized clients to access many Workspace Service features in a user friendly way. cloud-client is an easy way to use both a storage cloud and IaaS.
• Provides an implementation of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that allows you to use clients developed for the real EC2 system against Nimbus based clouds.
• WSRF based: protocol implementation.
• S3 REST API clients can also be used for managing VM storage with the Nimbus system.
• Alows clients to create auto-configuring clusters.
• Resource management options including schedulers such as PBS.
• LANTorrent – a file distribution protocol which act as a means to multi-cast virtual machine images to many backend nodes.
• Flexible group management.
• Per-client usage tracking.
• Per-user Storage Quota.
• Flexible request authentication and authorization.
• Simple user management.
• Configuration management.
• One-click clusters.
• Workspace client.
• VM network configuration.
• Local resource management plugin.
• Xen and KVM plugins.
• Site scheduler integration.
• VM resource usage enforcement (resource allocation).

Website: www.nimbusproject.org
Support:
Developer: Kate Keahey, Tim Freeman and others
License: Apache License version 2

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