Coasters: Uniform Resource Provisioning and Access for Clouds and Grids

In this paper we present the Coaster System. It is an automatically-deployed node provisioning (Pilot Job) system for grids, clouds, and ad-hoc desktop-computer networks supporting file staging, on-demand opportunistic multi-node allocation, remote logging, and remote monitoring. The Coaster System has been previously [32] shown to work at scales of thousands of cores. It has been used since 2009 for applications in fields that include biochemistry, earth systems science, energy modeling, and neuroscience. The system has been used successfully on the Open Science Grid, the TeraGrid [1], supercomputers (IBM Blue Gene/P [15], Cray XT and XE systems [5], and Sun Constellation [26]), a number of smaller clusters, and three cloud infrastructures (BioNimbus [2], Future Grid [20] and Amazon EC2 [16]).