ProActive Cloud Connectors

ProActive Scheduler is able not only to launch computing jobs on infrastructure where it’s installed but also to create infrastructures on demand. It is often useful when you want to isolate your computations, have a root access to machines or use an exotic software for your computations.

In the core of ProActive Scheduler stands a part responsible for managing resources. All resource are splitted by sources sharing the same infrastructure and access policy. A node source can be a set of desktop machines available through the network or a cloud infrastructure dynamically deployed on a servers.

We support two major cloud management software OpenStack and CloudStack. To use them with ProActive clone and build it from the dedicated repository

Then drop the jars into addons folder of ProActive Scheduler and enable them in configs by adding

• org.ow2.proactive.iaas.cloudstack.CloudStackInfrastructure to the config/rm/nodesource/infrastructures configuration file (CloudStack)
• org.ow2.proactive.iaas.openstack.NovaInfrastructure to the config/rm/nodesource/infrastructures configuration file (OpenStack)
• org.ow2.proactive.iaas.IaasPolicy to the config/rm/nodesource/policies configuration file (deployment policy)

Once enabled you can either deploy infrastructure manually using ProActive Resource Manager interface or configure your computations to deploy the infrastructure on demand.

In orders to launch you computations on Virtual Machines we need to configure them so that ProActive daemon is launched at the moment of VM boot. For this purpose we use “user data” (see cloudinit) to pass a launching script to the VM instance or just preconfigured images. E.g. for cloudstack infrastructure ProActive Scheduler launches daemon using the following script (this daemon will be used later by the Scheduler to run computations on this host)


This script uses pre installed ProActive but it can be modified to download ProActive automatically. Once your VMs are up and running you can submit jobs to them through ProActive Scheduler.

Sometimes it’s important to launch a set of VMs for particular computations on demand and prevent other jobs to be scheduled on these hosts. We developed a special deployment policy (IaasPolicy) for this purpose (see our doc for details). It scans the queue of jobs in the scheduler and triggers the infrastructure deployment for jobs with special markers. The infrastructure will be protected by a special token (see the first parameter in generic information below) and only jobs having it will be scheduled there.  Here is an example of such job

For this job the policy will start the infrastructure described in the generic information. Once deployed the scheduler launches tasks on these computing resources and turns them off at the end of computations. It is also possible to control the exact moment of resource deployment / undeployment from a workflow but this will be discussed in another post.