Scientific Computing Environments in the age of virtualization toward a universal platform for the Cloud

This paper describes Biocep-R, an Open Source platform for the virtualization of Scientific Computing Environments (SCEs) such as R and Scilab. To our knowledge it is the first time that a software platform enables geographically distributed collaborators to view and analyze terabytes of data interactively and collaboratively, using standard computational tools. Those tools can be running on high performance machines or on a Cloud. This is also the first time that a full end-to-end solution is proposed for reproducible computational research in a Cloud and for virtual appliances-based education.