CloudMip Platform

Head:  François THIÉBOLT

CloudMIP is a generalist cloud platform whose purchase made in 2011 has been supported by the GIS France-Grilles. One of the objectives of this GIS is to provide the scientific community with a set of cloud platforms distributed throughout the territory. The second objective, whose implementation is still in progress, is to federate all these Cloud platforms and make them accessible simply via an IU that relieves the user of the choice of sites for his experiments.

The CloudMIP platform is open to all collaborations related to the field of research as well as teaching (over a limited period of time). In the past, this platform has been used by the ANR MéteoSwift and the FabSpace 2.0 project. More recently, following a request transmitted by the GIS France-Grille, we have deployed a VM for the ANR GWAS led by INRAE. Also noteworthy is a collaboration in neuroscience with the CHU Rangueil around the analysis of WSI files (scan). Finally, the ANR DataZero project also made use of the platform.

Positioning of the platform in relation to existing local and national platforms

Amazon Cloud and OVH offerings are certainly attractive to many of us, particularly because of the strong network constraints imposed by the IT department: some projects, particularly in the environmental sector, use OVH VMs because of their very low cost and wide open access. Compared with the Grid5000 platform, which also offers a system for deploying a cloud infrastructure, the difference here lies in CloudMIP’s ability to offer and maintain VMs over a much longer period (2 to 3 years for example). In addition, CloudMIP also offers persistent storage space for user data.

In terms of education, the ISP has a VMWare platform, but it is not suitable for students to deploy their VMs themselves; the scope for action then becomes non-existent when it comes to infrastructure administration (VM migration, investment policies, etc.).

 Technical and organizational description

Currently, the CloudMIP platform consists of 276 physical cores for about 2TO of RAM. The storage part includes a 40TO NFS server in Raid-6. VMs can be allocated up to a few terabytes of persistent storage space.

Website of the platform