FutureGrid Image Repository: A Generic Catalog and Storage System for Heterogeneous Virtual Machine Images

Future Grid (FG) is an experimental, high-performance test bed that supports HPC, cloud and grid computing experiments for both application and computer scientist. Future Grid includes the use of virtualization technology to allow the support of a wide range of operating systems in order to include a test bed for various cloud computing infrastructure as a service frameworks. Therefore, efficient management of a variety of virtual machine images becomes a key issue. Current cloud frameworks do not provide a way to manage images for different IaaS frameworks. They typically provide their own image repositories, but in general they do not allow us to store the needed metadata to handle other IaaS images. We present a generic catalog and image repository to store images of any type. Our image repository has a convenient interface that distinguishes image types. Therefore, it is not only useful for Future Grid, but also for any application that needs to manage images.