Enabling Automated HPC / Database Deployment via the AppScale Hybrid Cloud Platform

In this paper, we discuss a prevalent issue facing the HPC community today: the lack of automation in the installation, deployment, and integration of HPC and database software. As a result, scientists today must play a dual role as re-searchers and as system administrators. The time required for scientists to become proficient with software stacks is significant and has increased with the complexity of modern systems such as cloud-based platforms and infrastructures. However, cloud computing offers many potential benefits to HPC software developers. It facilitates dynamic acquisition of computing and storage resources and access to scalable services. Moreover, cloud platforms such as AppScale ab-stract away the underlying system and automate deploy-ment and control of supported software and services. As part of this project, we have extended AppScale with do-main specific language support called Neptune that gives developers straightforward control over automatic configu-ration and deployment of cloud applications. Neptune also extends cloud support beyond web-services to HPC appli-cations, components, and libraries. We discuss AppScale and Neptune, and how they can be extended via more in-telligent database usage to provide a better solution for the next-generation of cloud-based HPC and data-intensive ap-plications. 2