CLEVER : a light cloud environment for clusters and grids

The Cloud Computing paradigm is nowadays already affirmed in the scenario of computing at least on the same foot of his ancestor, Grid Computing. Both Grids and Clouds provide access to large, distributed, computing and storage resources, but Clouds massively exploit virtualization to provide uniform interface to the underlying resource, thus hiding physical heterogeneity, geographical distribution and faults. Similarities exist between the two computing models, but the differences are those that matter most. Grid computing is better suited for organizations with heavy applications and/or large amounts of data being analyzed by a small number of users, whereas Cloud computing is better suited to environments where there is a large number of users requesting small amounts of data, or many but small allocation requests. Although Grid technology primarily dominates the public sector and the scientific computing environments, new interests have raised in deploying cloud technology to improve the management and reliability of those resources via the virtualization layer. The aim of this contribution is to present an integration example of both technologies where cluster and/or Grid resources are used to easily deploy on-demand Clouds using the CLEVER innovative Cloud middleware. CLEVER 1) simplifies the access management of private/hybrid Clouds, 2) provides simple and easily accessible interfaces to interact with different interconnected Clouds, 3) deploys Virtual Machines and 4) performs load balancing through migration. A route to CLEVER integration with a grid environment will be shown and the preliminary