Welcome to FutureGrid Rain!¶

FutureGrid Rain is a tool that will allow users to place customized environments like virtual clusters or IaaS frameworks onto resources. The process of raining goes beyond the services offered by existing scheduling tools due to its higher-level toolset targeting virtualized and non-virtualized resources. Rain will be able to move resources from one infrastructure to another and compare the execution of an experiment in the different supported infrastructures.

In order to support Rain we need a flexible image management framework. Thus, Rain includes the FutureGrid Image Management framework which defines the full life cycle of the images in FutureGrid. It involves the process of creating, customizing, storing, sharing and registering images for different FutureGrid environments.

This framework allows users to generate personalized abstract images by simply specifying a list of requirements such as OS, architecture, software, and libraries. These images are generic enough that through manipulations they can be adapted for several IaaS or HPC infrastructures with little effort by the users. It will support the management of images for Nimbus, Eucalyptus, OpenStack, OpenNebula, and bare-metal HPC infrastructures.