BOINC as a Service for the SlapOS Cloud: Tools and Methods

In this article we introduce the problems and solutions related to the integration of desktop grid middleware in a cloud, in our case the open source SlapOS cloud. We focus on the issues that describe the integration of what we call a recipe (a description of a process related to the automatic deployment of applications) which is one aspect of systems design in service-oriented architecture and Cloud Computing. The context of our work is somehow orthogonal to what is done traditionally in the Cloud because we do not rely on virtual machines and there is no data center, in the common sense of the word. We also introduce our environment (IDE) for developing applications, designed for SlapOS. We demonstrate that from the initial deployment model we can take into account not only Web applications, B2B applications. . . but also grid applications; here a desktop grid middleware that constitutes a case study. Our first contribution focuses on the problems to automatically deploy and install a desktop grid application, on demand, with no administrator intervention. The second contribution focuses on the architectural design of an IDE for the SlapOS cloud and we illustrate our IDE's usage in the context of our use case.