The COMETA e-Infrastructure: A platform for business applications in Sicily

The COMETA e-Infrastructure running in Sicily is compliant with the EGEE middleware and specifications offering a great computing power and huge storage capacity. Since its beginning one of the main goals has been to extend the adoption of Grid paradigm from the academic to business world. Several software and hardware extensions have been implemented in order to enhance the infrastructure performances; they include a new low-latency net layer reserved to heavy parallel applications; some modifications to the parallel job submission and execution procedures for a better support of MPI-based applications; new tools for job monitoring and file catalogue interaction; a scheduling policy tailored on the requirements of a complex environment hosting heterogeneous jobs; the GridLM license server able to grant access to commercial software only to authorised users; finally, the Secure Storage Service defends from insider abuse and completes a very high security level environment. The proposed business model includes a wide range of services collectively defined as Infrastructure-as-a-Service. All the above components result in a powerful and flexible platform, easy to use for any applications and open to further developments.