The Science Cloud Case Study in ASCENS

The EU integrated project ASCENS is working on a coherent, integrated set of methods and tools to build self-aware, self-adaptive and self-expressive autonomic components which are running within environments we call “ensembles”. The ASCENS project uses three case studies to validate its results, one of which is the science cloud case study. The science cloud is a platform-as-a-service solution which implements voluntary computing, i.e. each node may join or leave freely. The cloud implements a peer-to-peer communication infrastructure and offers the service of application execution to users and developers. It may additionally and optionally employ infrastructure-as-a-service solutions for load distribution and energy conservation. The cloud case study serves as a testbed for ASCENS method and is built in a modular way to enable experiments with its individual parts.